Rating iOS developer libraries may be a rather subjective proposition. What makes one library “better” than the next? On the basis of some mobile app development company it can be said very few libraries are favorite to the developer. Custom made software developer tends to use them a lot. In this article I tried to fetch all the famous open-source iOS libraries that are usually used by a best app development company.

Instead of polling my colleagues or attempting to rate those for myself, all the results are given below:

1. Alamofire

Alamofire iOS is kind of AFNetworking’s younger and more of a trendy brother and of course more stylish what can be considered as an alternative of AFNetworking. It is an elegant networking library written in Swift iOS. It is a Swift-based HTTP networking library for iOS and Mac OS X. It provides a polished interface on top of Apple’s Foundation networking stack, which expedites many usual networking tasks such as providing network communication for a multiplayer game, and also makes uploading, downloading, and getting JSON’s a piece of cake. Alamofire’s elegance comes from the fact that it was written in Swift from ground up and does not inherit anything from its Objective-C, AFNetworking. Alamofire iOS offers chain able request/response techniques, JSON parameter and response serialization to perform basic networking tasks like uploading files and minimizing data from a third-party API. In simple words, it reduces the task of developer because developer does not need to directly deal with URLSession. Alamofire iOS uses URLSession internally.

However, by using an iOS library like Alamofire iOS, one can greatly reduce boilerplate code in their iOS app. Already mentioned, Alamofire iOS is an incredibly easy to use and makes everything look a lot cleaner.

GitHub Link: Alamofire

2. SwiftyJSON

It can make easy in order to deal with JSON data in Swift iOS. It is possible to merge one JSON into another JSON. Merging a JSON into another JSON adds all non-existing values to the original JSON which are only present in the other JSON. If both JSONs contain a value or data for the same key, mostly this value gets overwritten in the original JSON, but there are two cases where it provides some special treatment. By adapting SwiftyJSON, you will be no longer to face old error types, which might be affecting your efficiency in order to produce code flawlessly that means without any error. Apart from this, it is much easier to merge two as in one JSON to another one. Plus, this library can navigate through multiple levels only in one call.

GitHub Link: SwiftyJSON

3. Nuke

Nuke iOS is an open source Swift framework for loading, processing, caching, displaying, and preheating images. It is written by Alexander Grebenyuk, an experienced developer who also wrote.

What Nuke iOS Does?

Nuke iOS helps you do 6 main things:

1. Download Images: The primary goal of Nuke iOS is to create downloading and using images in your app fast, easy, and efficient.
2. Resize Images: So far, this is no different than what you can do with NSURLSession or alternate networking libraries. However you can also pass some image-specific parameters to your download task, by passing an Image request instead of an NSURL.
3. Cache Images: If you use Nuke, the photos you download will be cached automatically.
4. Process Images: Besides downloading and caching the image, Image request also allows you define custom filters to apply to the fetched image. Yes, you could technically do this by yourself, but it’s still a pleasant touch.
5. Deserialize and Decode Images: Once you request for an picture from the network, there are two things that must happen before iOS can display it on the screen: image deserialization, and image decryption.
6. Preheat Images: The step after deserialization is image decoding. An image always comes to you encrypted in a particular image format, usually denoted by the file’s extension, such as .JPG or .PNG. Image decoding takes the encoded file and uses image standards to translate the file into a 2-D grid of colors to indicate on the screen.

GitHub Link: Nuke

4. KINGFISHER

Similar to SDWebImage above, Kingfisher iOS is a library for downloading and caching images that is written strictly in Swift. It includes extensions for UIImageView and UIButton, which makes it a lot of obliging. You can also add a placeholder image that ought to show while the actual image is downloading. Many of the leading open-source iOS libraries continue to be written for Objective-C, however I’m seeing new Swift iOS libraries emerging frequently. Almost daily at times. The trend is shifting toward Swift iOS. You’re seeing so many Objective-C libraries on this list years once Swift’s release because they are tried and true and trustworthy in tens of thousands of apps.

GitHub Link: KINGFISHER

5. ObjectMapper

ObjectMapper is the main actor category of JSON library. ObjectMapper category ObjectMapper provides practicality for reading and writing JSON, either to and from basic POJOs (Plain old Java Objects), or to and from a general JSON Tree Model (JsonNode), further as connected practicality for acting conversions. It's additionally extremely customizable to figure each with totally different varieties of JSON content, and to support additional advanced Object ideas equivalent to polymorphism and Object identity. ObjectMapper additionally acts as a manufacturer for additional advanced ObjectReader and ObjectWriter categories.

From the above discussion it is clear that iOS developers’ lives have become a bit easier because of these framework. There are a lot whole available but these are some that are commonly used in custom made software company.

GitHub Link: ObjectMapper

6. Hue

All-in-one coloring utility that you’ll ever need to write in Swift. Hue is an Objective-C library for controlling the Philips Hue lighting system. It permits the developers to browse and write the entire state of a Philips Hue controller and each of the lights it manages, together with dynamic individual lamp color, power state an another settings. DPHue works equally well on OS X and iOS. The simplest way to use DPHue is via CocoaPods. The Hue controller can only handle about thirty requests in rapid succession before it starts rate limiting, which it done by responding to all requests with HTTP 503. Additionally, each lamp requires a individual request. This means that if anyone make many API requests lamps may take a while to change, and the Hue controller may start ignoring you. So if you try to make a change and it doesn't work, wait a few more and try again.

Hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically, as the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow.

GitHub Link: Hue

7. IQkeyboard

IQKeyboardManager is a drop-in universal library which allows you to prevent issues of the keyboard sliding up and covering UITextField/UITextView without needing you to writing any code and much more.

Just drag and drop IQKeyBoardManager directory to your project. That's it.

Key Features

• Zero line of code
• Works automatically
• No more UI scroll view
• No more sub classes
• No more manual work
• No more #imports

It has some alluring features for the developer. It supports device orientation. It enables/disables keyboard manager when needed with enable boolean. It also has easiest integration. Auto handle UI toolbar as a accessory input view of text field/text view with enable auto toolbar boolean. Auto handle UI toolbar can be managed by superview's hierarchy or can be managed by tag property of text field/text view using toolbar manage behaviour. UI view Category for easily adding Next/Previous and Done button as Keyboard UIToolBar, even automatic with enable auto toolbar boolean. Enable/Disable Next/Previous buttons with Category methods, even automatic with enable auto toolbar boolean. Set keyboard distance from text fields using keyboard distance from text field. Resign keyboard on touching outside using should resign on touch outside. Manage UI text view's frame when it's hight is too large to fit on screen with can adjust text view boolean. Can manage UI text field UI text view inside UI table view to UI scroll view. Can play input sound on Next/Previous/Done click. IQKeyboardManager allows you to prevent issues of the keyboard sliding up and cover UI text field UI text view without needing you to enter any code and no additional setup required. To use “IQKeyboardManager”, you simply need to add source files to your project.

GitHub Link: IQKeyboardManager

8. NotificationBanner

NotificationBanner is a particularly customizable and light-weight library that shows the notifications in display of every app associated drop alerts is an absolute way in iPhone or iPad. It’s often called as alert banner as it pop up the notifications on screen simultaneously.

It’s so famous because of some great features. It’s highly customizable. NSAttributedString responsive features. Easily supported by iPhone, iPhoneX, and iPad. Orientation change supported. Custom UIView responsive. Custom colors supportive. Scrolling label support for banners along with long titles/subtitles. Presenting from top or bottom responsive. Haptic feeback support. Built in banner queue.

GitHub Link: NotificationBanner

9. Realm

Realm is an open source object database management system that runs directly within phones, tablets or wearable. This repository holds the source code (ascii value) for the iOS, macOS, tvOS & watchOS versions of Realm Swift & Realm Objective-C.

As like other frameworks it has some unique cool features:

1. First Mobile: Realm.iOS is the first database designed from the ground up to run directly within phones, tablets and wearable.
2. Simple: Data is directly exposed as objects and query able by code, removing the need for ORM's riddled with performance & maintenance issues. Most of the users pick it up, getting simple apps up & running within minutes.
3. Modern: Realm.iOS supports relationships, generics, vectorization and Swift.
4. Fast: Realm.iOS is faster than raw SQLite on common operations, while maintaining an extremely rich feature set.

GitHub Link: Realm

10. Quick

Quick is a behavior-driven development framework for Swift as well as Objective-c. This framework has inspiration from RSpec, Specta and Ginkgo. Moreover, quick comes with Nimble as a matcher framework for tests. Nimble allows one to express an expected outcome using a natural, understandable language. However, certain versions of Quick and Nimble are applicable for only certain versions of Swift. Quick helps one to verify how Swift and Objective-C programs behave. It also follows a strong guideline to establish an effective test. Currently, over ten thousand apps use either Quick or Nimble.

GitHub Link: Quick

11. Eureka

Eureka is one of the best open-source iOS libraries to build form in Swift. By creating forms consisting of repetitive and complex code Eureka helps programmers to save time and effort.

The developers require to write the code once and use the same code anywhere. Because, instead of performing any repetitive tasks to create the forms, the library allows to build highly dynamic forms with reusable code. Moreover, Eureka’s abstraction performs duplication and code validation. Most importantly, it is supported by a large developer community.

GitHub Link: Eureka

12. Moya

Moya is a Network abstraction library for Swift. It provides one with an abstraction to make network calls without directly associating with Alamofire. Moya is focused on encapsulating network requests in a safe way by using enumerations to ensure compile-time while working with a network layer. Moreover, it focuses more on core features of an application than networking. It also helps one to set up an API manager in no time and deliver clean code with best practices.

GitHub Link: Moya

13. RxSwift

Rx is a generic concept of computation exhibits through observable element interface. It’s a framework for interacting with the Swift programming language. It tries to utilize as many concepts from the original version as possible, but some abstract ideas were adapted for more pleasant and effective integration with iOS/mac OS. However, cross platform documentation can be found on ReactiveX.io. RxSwift’s purpose is to ensure simple composition of asynchronous operations and data streams like the original Rx. Moreover, KVO observing, async operations and streams are all unified under abstraction of sequence. Thus, Rx is simple with a powerful approach.

GitHub Link: RxSwift

14. MagicalRecord

MagicalRecord is an active record-style library to make one’s core data code cleaner and simpler. It was an inspiration from the ease of Ruby on Rails' Active Record fetching. It mainly focuses on cleaning up Core Data related code. It also allows clear, simple and one-line fetches. Moreover, it still let to modify NSFetchRequest when request optimizes are required. However, MagicalRecord can help import data from standard NSObject instances such as NSArray and NSDictionary directly into your Core Data store.

GitHub Link: MagicalRecord

15. FSCalendar

It’s a fully customizable iOS calendar library applicable for Objective-C and swift. Any programmer can build their own calendar with trendy features using this library. It allows a creator to construct UI compatible with different forms of iOS device.

GitHub Link: FSCalendar

16. DeepLinkKit

DeepLinkKit is an impressive route-matching, block-based way to handle one’s deep links. Instead of deciding how to format URLs, one can just parse them, pass data and navigate to certain content or perform actions. Thus, this library and a few lines of code will get things on the expected way.

GitHub Link: DeepLinkKit