Android Third-Party Library
There are many third-party libraries for Android but several of them are "must have" libraries that are extremely popular and are often used in almost any Android project. Each has different purposes but all of them make life as a developer much more pleasant. The major libraries are listed below in a few categories.
Standard Pack
This "standard pack" listed below are libraries that are quite popular, widely applicable and should probably be setup within most Android apps:
Name
Description
Retrofit
A type-safe REST client for Android which intelligently maps an API into a client interface using annotations.
Picasso
A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.
ButterKnife
Using Java annotations, makes Android development better by simplifying common tasks.
Parceler
Android Parcelable made easy through code generation
IcePick
Android Instance State made easy
Crouton
Context-sensitive, configurable alert notices much better than toasts
Hugo
Easier logging using annotations
LeakCanary
Catch memory leaks in your apps
Convenience
Dagger - A fast dependency injector for Android and Java. See this video intro from Square.
AutoParcel - Port of Google AutoValue for Android with Parcelable generation goodies.
Hugo - Easier logging within your app
Logger - Much cleaner and easier logcat trace messages
Trikita Log - Tiny logger backwards compatible with android.util.Log, but supporting format strings, comma-separated values, non-android JVMs, optional tags etc
LeakCanary - Easily catch memory leaks as they occur
AndroidAnnotations - Framework that speeds up Android development. It takes care of the plumbing, and lets you concentrate on what's really important. By simplifying your code, it facilitates its maintenance
RoboGuice - Powerful extensions to Android using dependency injection.
Calligraphy - Custom fonts made easy
EasyFonts - Easy preloaded custom fonts in your app
AndroidViewAnimations - Common property animations made easy
SDK Manager Plugin - Helpful plugin especially for group projects if you're missing an SDK version, haven't downloaded an API version, or your support library is updated.
Extensions
Otto - An enhanced Guava-based event bus with emphasis on Android support
EventBus - Android optimized event bus that simplifies communication between components.
Tape - Tape is a collection of queue-related classes for Android and Java
RxJava - Reactive Extensions for the JVM
Priority JobQueue - Easier background tasks
ACRA - Crash reporting made easy and free. Check the setup instructions and open-source backend.
Networking
Retrofit - A type-safe REST client for Android and Java which intelligently maps an API into a client interface using annotations.
Picasso - A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.
Ion - Powerful asynchronous networking library. Download as a jar here.
Android Async HTTP - Asynchronous networking client for loading remote content such as JSON.
Volley - Google's HTTP library that makes networking for Android apps easier and most importantly, faster.
OkHttp - Square's underlying networking library with support for asynchronous requests.
Glide - Picasso image loading alternative endorsed by Google
IceNet - Android networking wrapper consisting of a combination of Volley, OkHttp and Gson
Android Universal Image Loader - Popular alternative for image loading that can replace Picasso or Glide.
ListView
EasyListViewAdapters - Building multi-row-type listview made much cleaner & easier.
GridListViewAdapters - Easily build unlimited Grid cards list like play-store. (ListView working as unlimited GridView)
StickyListHeaders - An android library for section headers that stick to the top of a ListView
PinnedListView - Pinned Section with ListView
ListViewAnimations - Easy way to animate ListView items
EtsyStaggeredGrid - Staggered GridView
Cardslib - Card UI for Lists or Grids
SwipeListView - Swipeable List
PullToRefresh-ListView - Easy to use pull-to-refresh functionality for ListViews.Download and install as a library project.
QuickReturn - Reveal or hide a header or footer as the list is scrolled in a direction.
RecyclerView
UltimateRecyclerView - Augmented RecyclerView with refreshing, loading more, animation and many other features.
android-parallax-recyclerview - An adapter which could be used to achieve a parallax effect on RecyclerView.
Easy Navigation
PagerSlidingTabStrip - An interactive indicator to navigate between the different pages of a ViewPager.
jpardogo/PagerSlidingTabStrip - This fork of the original is actively maintained and has support for a material design look.
ViewPagerIndicator - Paging indicator widgets compatible with the ViewPager from the Android Support Library and ActionBarSherlock.
JazzyViewPager - Pager with more animations
ParallaxPager - ViewPager with Parallax scrolling effects
ParallaxHeaderViewPager - Another ViewPager with Parallax scrolling effects
ParallaxPagerTransformer - A pager transformer for Android with parallax effect
SlidingMenu - Library that allows developers to easily create applications with sliding menus like those made popular in the Google+, YouTube, and Facebook apps.
Android Satellite Menu - Radial menu which is configurable reminiscent of the "Path" menu style.
ArcMenu - Alternate radial menu modeled after the "Path" menu style.
AndroidSlidingUpPanel - Sliding Up Panel
DraggablePanel - Panels that can be dragged
UI Components
Crouton - Context-sensitive, configurable alert notices much better than toasts. Download jar from here. See working sample code
BetterPickers - BetterPickers for easy input selection
RoundedImageView - Easily round corners or create oval-shaped images with this popular library.
Android StackBlur - Dynamically blur images
Android Bootstrap - Bootstrap UI widgets
PhotoView - ImageView that supports touch gestures
ShowcaseView - Highlight the best bits of your app
FadingActionBar - Cool actionbar fade effect
AndroidViewAnimations - Easily apply common animations
ProgressWheel - Better progress bar
SmoothProgressBar - Horizontal indeterminate progress
Rebound - Easy spring dynamics
AndroidImageSlider - Animated image transitions
FloatingActionButton - Material design floating buttons made easy
Foursquare-CollectionPicker - Item Picker which looks like Foursquare Tastes picker
NexusDialog - Create form dialogs easily
dialogplus - Simple, easy dialogs
Iconify - Easily embed icons into your app
Android StepsView - A library to create StepsView for Android
Drawing
Leonids - Simple and easy particle effects (See Tutorial)
MPAndroidChart - A powerful Android chart view / graph view library
AChartEngine - This is a charting software library for Android applications
HoloGraphLibrary - Newer graphing library
EazeGraph - Another newer library with potential
AndroidCharts - Easy to use charts
AndroidGraphView - library to create flexible and nice-looking diagrams.
AndroidPlot - plotting library for Android
WilliamChart - Flexible charting library with useful motion capabilities.
HelloCharts - Charts/graphs library for Android with support for scaling, scrolling and animations.
MPAndroidChart-A powerful Android chart view / graph view library, supporting line- bar- pie- radar- bubble- and candlestick charts as well as scaling, dragging and animations.
Scanning
ZXing - Barcode or QR scanner
barcodescanner - Newer alternative
zxscanlib - ZXing alternative
android-quick-response-code - Another alternative
Persistence
ActiveAndroid
greenDAO
SugarORM
ORMLite
Realm
NexusData
Hawk - Persistent secure key/value store
Poetry - Persist JSON directly into SQLite
DbFlow - A robust, powerful, and very simple ORM android database library with annotation processing.
Compatibility
NineOldAndroids - Fully compatible animation library that works with all versions of Android. Widely used. Download and install as a library project.
HoloEverywhere - Backport Holo theme from Android 4.2 to 2.1+
CropImage - Simple compatible cropping intent for images
Scrolling and Parallax
This is a list of popular scrolling and parallax libraries:
QuickReturn - Reveal or hide a header or footer as the list is scrolled in a direction.
ParallaxPagerTransformer - A pager transformer for Android with parallax effect
ParallaxHeaderViewPager - Another ViewPager with Parallax scrolling effects
Android-ObservableScrollView - Android library to observe scroll events on scrollable views.
Scrollable - Automatic scrolling logic when implementing scrolling tabs
ParallaxPager - ViewPager with Parallax scrolling effects
android-parallax-recyclerview - An adapter which could be used to achieve a parallax effect on RecyclerView.
Resources
Check out the following resources for finding libraries:
Android Elementals
Wasabeef Core Libraries
Wasabeef UI Libraries
Android-Libs.com
http://androidlibs.org/
http://appdevwiki.com/wiki/show/HomePage
http://androidweekly.net/toolbox
http://android-arsenal.com
References
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidUsefulLibraries/article.html
http://actionbarsherlock.com/
http://nineoldandroids.com/
https://github.com/roboguice/roboguice/wiki
https://github.com/excilys/androidannotations/wiki
https://github.com/erikwt/PullToRefresh-ListView
https://github.com/jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu
http://square.github.io/picasso/