I analyzed the app frame works from the linked article here is the result when the count is larger than one, first column is usage count among popular apps.
One more interesting take-away - Uber has both Adjust and TUNE(Mobile App Tracking)'s SDK. Lyft has both Kochava and TUNE(Mobile App Tracking)'s SDK. All these SDK's do Attribution analytics (where are my app installs coming from). I wonder if app installs are so importnat to Uber and Lyft that they need 2 SDKs each doing the same thing to keep each other's data honest?
It's possible they are running advertising campaigns with ad networks that are only integrated with one of these attribution partners? I know I've started to see a lot of uber interstitial ads in games that I didn't use to.
TUNE is not part of Facebook's Mobile Measurement Partner program, though they do offer workarounds for this. This likely means Lyft and Uber are using TUNE for non-Facebook attribution, and Adjust / Kochava for Facebook.
We'll probably throw all the data up on appsight.co site and let folks do the filtering themselves. Sign up on the site now and we'll alert you when we launch for Beta.
We have been doing SDK Recognition for a couple of years here at Apptopia, and it's absolutely not as easy as it's being portrayed here (i.e. run this GIT library). The technology requires constant attention, maintenance and improving otherwise you very quickly find yourself missing analysis for 65-70% of an app's SDKs. In fact, we have recently re-built our SDK Tech completely as we found previous methods (what we call "Binary Analysis") were extremely inaccurate and resulted in over 20% missed SDKs.
The comparison of Uber and Lyft is interesting. Our latest recognition for iOS shows Uber with 6 currently installed and 6 others uninstalled since 2013. Lyft made a lot of updates on May 9 and has 8 installed and 12 uninstalled. The only SDK that they are both currently using is SocketRocket.
It seems in the dataset from OP more different SDKs are detected than we do at AppBrain. We invite anyone to report missing SDKs will definitely review the current presented set to add our omissions!
These lists leave out some important frameworks these apps are built on. For example, Pinterest links AsyncDisplayKit. I'm curious how this data is collected. If Keyword matching against known popular public frameworks, it might be worth expanding your queries to include all public CocoaPods.
Yeah good catch. The SDK list we scan against isn't comprehensive. It doesn't have AsyncDisplayKit (I just added it to the list). Great suggestion on Cocoapods, we'll be adding those. We'll publish more comprehensive list on our site AppSight.co once we launch our closed Beta. Would love your feedback too at that point.
This is some cool data. Am surprised how often AFNetworking and Crashlytics are used. Unsurprisingly, for advertising, FB and Google Ad SDKs totally dominates. I signed up. When will you be launching the site with full data?
Crashlytics is like the only bright spot out of the whole Twitter product suite. Or major players don't see Twitter as a threat at all anymore. Not like FB
Surprised to see so much use of AFNetworking. Is it really necessary?
Looking at the example code it doesn't seem to add much (these days), with the overhead of managing another sdk.
It used to be a dramatically better API than what the system provided. These days it's debatable as to whether it's actually better than just using NSURLSession directly, but AFNetworking is well established as the default that everyone who has ever touched an iOS application knows how to use, and there isn't really any incentive for ripping it out of existing applications (and if you have a mix of old and new applications it's easier to just use the same networking API in all of them, so it continues to be used for new ones as well).
The most evident pro is saving you to type many more lines of code to implement the download or upload of a resource (json, image, etc.) from/to a web server.
I think it depends. You can draw some take aways if major apps are using a particular SDK - stability for example. Think about scaling. If uber has your SDK and you are logging events, you probably need a fairly meaningful infrastructure to do that.
We indexed it exactly for that reason but also for the fact that it has one of the highest payment processing volume. So we were curious what payment processor they used.
I see. I remember reading about the Starbucks mobile payment system taking off even though they launched recently, I believe the Summer or fall of last year.
Thx! We think people will find this useful too. Feel free to spread the word and have folks sign up at AppSight.co. Will have a lot more comprehensive data when we launch!
"cat topmobilesdk.txt | tr "," "\n" | sed -e "s/^ //g" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n"