Pretty surprising to see Alamofire above AFNetworking given that AFNetworking is the Objective-C variant and Alamofire is for Swift. That almost seems to indicate that there are more Swift apps in the top 200 then Objective-C apps. Of course one can use Alamofire in Objective-C, but that just seems like making your life harder than it needs to be
We found that interesting too. You can see the apps that upgrade from Objective-C to Swift as well when they uninstall AFNetworking for Alamofire. It's usually accompanied by a huge overhaul of a bunch of SDKs.
Note that these are the top 200 trending apps (not most used or popular iOS apps), so the data set will skew towards newer (and more likely to be written in Swift) apps.
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think ObjectiveC metadata is covered by the Fairplay code encryption.
If that is the case, then you can just download the .ipas using iTunes, and then run classdump ( http://stevenygard.com/projects/class-dump/ ) on them to get a list of ObjC classes. From the class names, you can then figure out which frameworks are linked in the app binary.
I didn't do it at first, most probably did, but if you click through to the Top 200 themselves and select an app, you can see all the SDKs the app uses. Pretty cool.
I never heard about Fabric. Can't seem to understand what they do from their website. There is no mention of what it does on the home page. Is this some sort of an analytics library?
It's the result of Crashlytics, a crash reporting library, being acquihired by Twitter. Now it's bundled with the Twitter SDKs and Twitter's ad network integration. I'm not affiliated with it, but have written several comments about it [1]
The branding is very confusing and ends up adding a bunch of buzzwords instead of explaining what it is.
On a side note, why do people use closed source Crashlytics, when there are open source solutions available (still run by for profit companies, but source of their SDKs are open)?
Alamofire (an all-Swift library) is linked in 31% more of the top 200 free apps than AFNetworking (an all-Objective C library). I guess Swift is still making headway into Big Apps...
Also, 6 apps are still using ASIHTTPRequest, despite the last release being 5 years ago.
Worse still, 3 apps use a combination of ASIHTTPRequest, AFNetworking, and Alamofire - that's a library that was abandoned 5 years ago, an Objective-C library, and a Swift library. Oh man.
Keep in mind that some SDKs have internal dependencies. Those apps could just be linking a set of SDKs that happen to include those 3 networking libraries.
29 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 88.9 ms ] thread* Spark-SDK – This is for controlling IoT devices, why does Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify ship this?
* Squareup – Do people use this over Stripe? Or what is the use case?
Maybe a name clash ?
I'm guessing to some extent it must rely on a jailbroken iOS to get past the .ipa code encryption, as with this similar analysis: https://medium.com/ios-os-x-development/libraries-used-in-th...
If that is the case, then you can just download the .ipas using iTunes, and then run classdump ( http://stevenygard.com/projects/class-dump/ ) on them to get a list of ObjC classes. From the class names, you can then figure out which frameworks are linked in the app binary.
No jailbreak required :)
how much fun did you have figuring out generation of kbsync and the crazy iTunes otp / auth tokens? :)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20fabric&sort=byDate&p...
On a side note, why do people use closed source Crashlytics, when there are open source solutions available (still run by for profit companies, but source of their SDKs are open)?
Also, 6 apps are still using ASIHTTPRequest, despite the last release being 5 years ago.
Worse still, 3 apps use a combination of ASIHTTPRequest, AFNetworking, and Alamofire - that's a library that was abandoned 5 years ago, an Objective-C library, and a Swift library. Oh man.