A Library is a very common thing we use in day-to-day development in Android. Libraries make developers life easy because the functionality that a developer needs to implement is already done by someone else and can be utilized.

In my previous article, I have shown how to add any kind of libraries into the Android Studio project.

Today we are going to learn how to find the right library for our android project.

VIDEO TUTORIAL DEMO

The best place where we can find almost all kinds of android libraries is android-arsenal.com.

Things to know about it:

1. You call it a hub or source of all kinds of android libraries.
2. It provides both Free and Paid types of libraries. 
3. Categorization of libraries provided here which is a great way to filter out the library which we need.

   

4. If you don’t find the category you are looking for you can do a search as well on the top right corner.

   

5. You can open any library and can see the demo and also how to use it in your android project.
6. All libraries hosted here are directly linked to Github and there will be a link which can take you there.

   

Now we got to know from where to search the library. Now we will see how to select the right library.

Let’s suppose we need to implement bar/QR code in our application and we need to find a library for it. So select bar code and it will give you all libraries related to the bar and QR code.

Note: DON’T ADD ANY LIBRARY BLINDLY.

Things to taken care of before adding any library:

1. Make sure to check the star rating of the library. The more the star rating more the library is stable and more developers are using/trusting it. Try to find the library with more star rating.

   

   

   

2. Do not add any library if you are going to use only single functionality of the library.
3. After adding a library make sure to check how much size it adds to your app. Since the size is a very important part of any app.
4. Read the documentation properly because some libraries get deprecated with time. So it’s useless to add the deprecated library in your app. Check the min and max SDK supported by the library. As in android, there might be a case that your app min SDK version is lower than the library min SDK version which can have problems for the lower-end devices. 
5. If you have any issues with the library like any crash is happening, or you want to achieve something using the library but it’s not mentioned in the documentation then you can ask in the GitHub page of the library under the issues tab. You can search for the existing issue or you can create a new issue. 

   

6. Last but important, make sure to give credit to the library owner in your app and try to contribute as well for open source libraries.

I hope this article will help you in finding and selecting the right library.

Thanks.