Best 13 Android Libraries for 2025 Every Developer Needs

The Android ecosystem is a vibrant and ever-evolving landscape. To build truly compelling and efficient applications in 2025, developers need to leverage the power of well-maintained and robust libraries. These pre-built components save countless hours of development time, improve code quality, and often provide functionalities that would be complex to implement from scratch.

This article delves into 13 of the best Android libraries that every developer should have in their toolkit in 2025, especially those working at a Mobile App Development Company. These libraries are categorized by their primary function, offering solutions for networking, UI enhancement, data handling, dependency injection, image loading, and more. By incorporating these into your projects, you can significantly boost your productivity and create higher-quality Android applications for your clients.

I. Networking & Data Fetching

1. Retrofit: When it comes to making network requests in Android, Retrofit remains a top choice. Developed by Square, it provides a type-safe REST client for Android and Java.

   • Type Safety: Retrofit converts your API endpoints into Java interfaces, ensuring type safety for your API calls.
   • Annotation-Based Configuration: Define API endpoints and request parameters using annotations, making your code clean and declarative.
   • Converter Factories: Supports various converter factories like Gson, Jackson, and Moshi for handling JSON and other data formats.
   • Integration with RxJava and Coroutines: Seamlessly integrates with reactive programming libraries like RxJava and Kotlin Coroutines for asynchronous operations.

2. OkHttp: Often used in conjunction with Retrofit (as its underlying HTTP client), OkHttp is a powerful and efficient HTTP client for Android and Java applications. Also developed by Square.

   • HTTP/2 Support: Improves network performance by allowing multiple requests and responses to be multiplexed over a single connection.
   • Connection Pooling: Reduces latency by reusing existing connections.
   • GZIP Compression: Automatically compresses request and response bodies, saving bandwidth.
   • Interceptors: Allows you to intercept and modify network requests and responses for logging, authentication, and more.

II. UI & User Experience

3. Jetpack Compose: While technically a UI toolkit, Jetpack Compose deserves a spot as a fundamental library for modern Android UI development. It’s Android’s modern declarative UI toolkit, simplifying UI development with Kotlin.

   • Declarative UI: Describe your UI as a function of data, making UI code more intuitive and easier to reason about.
   • Kotlin-First: Built with Kotlin, leveraging its conciseness and safety features.
   • Interoperability with Views: Can be used alongside traditional Android Views.
   • Live Previews: See your UI changes in real-time within the Android Studio IDE.

4. Lottie: Developed by Airbnb, Lottie is a library that renders After Effects animations in real-time on mobile (and web).

   • Vector Animations: Provides smooth and scalable vector animations.
   • JSON-Based Format: Animations are exported as JSON files, which are lightweight and easy to integrate.
   • Interactive Animations: Allows you to control animation playback, speed, and even respond to user interactions.
   • Cross-Platform: Available for Android, iOS, and Web.

5. Material Components for Android: This library provides implementation of Material Design guidelines, offering pre-built UI components that adhere to modern design principles.

   • Consistent UI: Ensures a consistent and visually appealing look and feel across your application.
   • Customization: Offers extensive customization options to match your brand.
   • Accessibility: Components are designed with accessibility in mind.
   • Up-to-Date with Material Design: Regularly updated to reflect the latest Material Design specifications.

III. Data Handling & Storage

6. Room Persistence Library: Part of Android Jetpack, Room is an abstraction layer over SQLite, providing a more robust and developer-friendly way to work with persistent data.

   • Compile-Time Verification: SQL queries are verified at compile time, reducing runtime errors.
   • LiveData and RxJava Integration: Seamlessly integrates with LiveData and RxJava for reactive data access.
   • Simplified Database Interactions: Provides annotations to define entities, DAOs (Data Access Objects), and databases, reducing boilerplate code.

7. Moshi: Developed by Square, Moshi is a modern JSON library for Android and Java that aims for simplicity and ease of use.

   • Kotlin-Friendly: Plays particularly well with Kotlin’s null safety and data classes.
   • Code Generation: Can generate efficient JSON adapters at compile time.
   • Extensibility: Supports custom adapters for handling complex data types.
   • Performance: Designed for efficient JSON parsing and serialization.

IV. Dependency Injection

8. Hilt: Hilt is Android’s recommended dependency injection library, built on top of Dagger. It simplifies dependency injection in Android applications by providing a standard way to incorporate Dagger’s power.
   • Android Jetpack Integration: Designed to work seamlessly with other Android Jetpack libraries.
   • Reduced Boilerplate: Automatically generates much of the dependency injection code.
   • Standardized Components: Provides predefined components for common Android classes like Activities, Fragments, and ViewModels.
   • Improved Testability: Makes it easier to write unit and integration tests.

V. Image Loading & Management

9. Glide: Developed by Bumptech and now maintained by Google, Glide is a fast and efficient image loading and caching library for Android.

   • Automatic Resource Management: Handles image loading, caching, and memory management automatically.
   • Image Transformations: Supports various image transformations like resizing, cropping, and applying filters.
   • Video and GIF Support: Can also load and display video thumbnails and GIFs.
   • Extensibility: Highly customizable to fit specific application needs.

10. Coil: Developed by Instacart, Coil (Coroutine-based Image Loader) is a modern image loading library for Android backed by Kotlin Coroutines.

    • Kotlin Coroutines and Flow: Leverages Kotlin’s concurrency features for efficient and asynchronous image loading.
    • Lightweight: Has a small codebase compared to some other image loading libraries.
    • Modern Architecture: Designed with modern Android development practices in mind.
    • Performance: Optimized for speed and efficiency.

VI. Asynchronous Operations & Concurrency

11. Kotlin Coroutines & Flow: While a language feature, Kotlin Coroutines and Flow are essential for handling asynchronous operations in a structured and concise way.
    • Simplified Asynchronous Code: Makes asynchronous programming easier to write and understand compared to traditional callbacks.
    • Structured Concurrency: Provides mechanisms for managing the lifecycle of asynchronous tasks.
    • Flow for Data Streams: Represents a stream of data that can be processed asynchronously.
    • Seamless Integration with Android Jetpack: Many Jetpack libraries, like Room and ViewModel, have excellent Coroutines and Flow support.

VII. Testing

12. JUnit 4 & JUnit 5: These are widely used Java testing frameworks for writing unit tests. JUnit 5 is the newer version with improved features and a more modular architecture.

    • Standard for Unit Testing: Provides annotations and APIs for writing and running unit tests.
    • Extensibility: Supports extensions for adding custom testing behavior.
    • Integration with Android Studio: Seamlessly integrates with the Android Studio testing environment.

13. Mockito: A popular mocking framework for Java and Android, Mockito allows you to create mock objects for dependencies in your unit tests, isolating the code under test.

    • Simplified Mock Creation: Provides an easy-to-use API for creating mock objects.
    • Behavior Verification: Allows you to verify that interactions with mock objects occurred as expected.
    • Reduced Test Dependencies: Helps in writing focused and isolated unit tests.

Conclusion:

In the fast-paced world of Android development in 2025, leveraging the right libraries can be a game-changer. The 13 libraries highlighted in this article represent a powerful toolkit for addressing common development challenges and building high-quality, efficient, and user-friendly Android applications. By staying updated with these and other valuable libraries, Android developers can significantly enhance their productivity and deliver exceptional mobile experiences. Embrace these tools, explore their capabilities, and elevate your Android development skills to the next level.