Making most of third party libraries?

I started this article with a question that when should we avoid using external libraries. I came across many incidents where many popular external libraries could lead to app issues for any buggy version of the library but if you are wisely deciding the use case when to use a library and which one to use, it can proportionally decrease your development time & boost your app’s performance.

In this article we focus primarily on two points :

Let’s have a look at the key metrics which should be taken into consideration before opting a library

Understanding the above point in details is quite important for us. As many of us think that using a library for networking is ok but using a library for table view/collection wrapper is way too much which might not be true.

Some UI libraries can actually skyrocket your development with much better interfaces and animations. So anything which is already developed by someone and used across can always opt. A very good example of the above scenario could be IGList or HERO, etc. which makes your code more decoupled, segregated and even much better interfaces with more testability.

How do we choose a library : There might be many different libraries on GitHub which can serve the same purpose, but we need to choose a library based on the following

It is very important to check the last commits for the library to understand how frequently the library is updated for open issues to avoid the mess in your codebase.

Example: The below shows the metrics which should be considered before selecting a library

Try to avoid dragging libraries in your code rather use cocoa-pods so that every time you install the/update you can get the latest version of the library.

2. When to avoid them

By this time we already know a lot of advantages of using third party libraries but we should still analyze the use case properly before opting for one. As using a library for very small features or least used use-case may not be very good idea. Eg: a wrapper for saving data in UserDefaults or keychain is probably not something for which we like to use the library.

On the last note, it is always good to write stuff on our own and maybe more encouraging for many developers which is absolutely amazing. If we really have time and willingness to write amazing codes let’s develop our own libraries and allow others to use.

The intent behind writing this blog was to be open & aware while using third-party libraries.

Also, I will recommend reading about the most popular libraries in present and the intent behind why they were developed to get more context.

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