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Top 10 Libraries for iOS Developers

Update note: This tutorial has been updated by Kishin Manglani. The original tutorial was written by Marcelo Fabri. It’s no secret that third-party iOS developer libraries can save precious time when you’re doing developing apps. The iOS open-source community is quite active, and we all know that leveraging libraries is a must when developing an […]


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.raywenderlich.com/259-top-10-libraries-for-ios-developers

Article is getting a bit dated, not to mention a bit redundant. Listing AFNetworking and Alamofire? Two progress/status indicators?

Not to mention the need for Masonry has been pretty much eliminated by the new constraint anchors added to iOS, and the need for SwiftyJSON has been obviated by Codable in Swift 4.

How about tossing out some of the old, and adding in things like RxSwift? Maybe some Dependency Injection hotness like Swinject or Resolver?

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but the criteria of how the list was created was explained at the beginning of the article.

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Totally disagree with SDWebImage. I am part of an iOS team handling a mixed code base app with over 300.000 unique monthly users and we saw a marked rise in crash-free users when we switched from SDWebImage to Nuke.

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Personally I think it would be better if they compile the list as 10 most installed Swift cocoa pods.

Yep, this article will only make those most “popular” libraries even more “popular” because its based on cocoa pods installations, and not actual use.
I agree some of them like JSON are now useless due to better native framework.

I would suggest XCGLogger instead of CocoaLumberjack

I’ve used SwiftyJSON in the past to deal with JSON returns, but I’ve found a struct adopting the Codable protocol is a lot easier. There’s a tutorial that’s up that runs through it on this site.

I think you guys are right - we should have called this “Most Installed Libraries According to Cocoapods” to be more accurate. Maybe next time, we’ll do this article a different way where we survey a bunch of advanced iOS developers or some such.

Thanks to everyone who’s chimed in with some of your favorites (or ones you don’t like), that’s helpful for anyone reading!

I would love to write a library that would end up in these kind of lists. can I get input about my latest library: GitHub - willpowell8/LocalizationKit_iOS: Realtime Dynamic localization translation delivery system for iOS and Mac OSX in Swift. Create and update texts from localization.com without needing to recompile or redeploy. Cocapod for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac)

Ufff Dude… NUKE… Hell Yeah! i used Gloss Too Mates and i Like so Much…

I’m very surprised that masonry & snapkit are so popular. You are really satisfied that develop speed? And you need build & run every time. I think we have better choice —FlexLib. We can use it to develop iOS native apps like android,react native way. For most ui development, it will speed up 70% at least. Do you want to try it?