I finally updated AppGoblin to show the most popular mobile SDKs that are used for Android and iOS apps. To recap, I’ve now decompiled ~24k Android and 6k iOS apps. I check for various plugins/frameworks/SDKs and have made a list of which are used in the most apps. You can also click into each one to see the top apps using that library or SDK.
Spoiler… Google & Apple
Ok, so let’s get the least important out the way. Apple & Googe are at the top. Apple is so deep in iOS that I didn’t even try to separate it out, and Google is right up there with ‘SDKs’ and libraries in 98% of android apps, and that 2% is probably because I’m still missing some.
IDEs & Engines
Android IDEs / Development tools
Takeway: JetBrains/IntelliJ at the top of course, and just had to include Eclipse, kinda cool to see some apps still using it, or perhaps have leftover parts? You can see a deeper breakdown of the full Eclipse SDK parts found here, which should probably be mapped into separate SDKs.
- JetBrains (android studio) – 27% Android apps (jetbrains.com | appgoblin.info/companies/jetbrains.com)
- JetBrains IntelliJ – 22% Android apps (intellij.org | appgoblin.info/companies/intellij.org)
- Mono Project (mono-project.com | appgoblin.info/companies/mono-project.com)
- Eclipse 0.8% (eclipse.org | appgoblin.info/companies/eclipse.org)
Language Tools
Takeaway: 40% of Android apps and some percentage of iOS are using Kotlin.
Upcoming: Reactive.dev is neck and neck with Flutter with both having an average of just under 10% of apps. Reactive.dev is a bit of an anomaly with 10+% for Android and only 5% for iOS. This likely means I’m missing some signals for reactive built apps. I recently added a check of the macho file using ipsw tool which I think exposes more internal hints for what was used than my previous method of scraping the unzipped IPA files for the frameworks/bundles and other files.
- Kotlin 40% Android (kotlinlang.org | appgoblin.info/companies/kotlinlang.org) – Language/build integration
- KMP Coroutines (github.com/rickclephas | appgoblin.info/companies/github.com-rickclephas)
- SKIE (github.com/touchlab/SKIE/) is one of the main ways I should be able to tell if an iOS app is using Kotlin Multi-Platform but so far I haven’t figured out how to map this.
- Flutter <10% (flutter.dev | appgoblin.info/companies/flutter.dev) – UI framework
- React Native <10% (reactnative.dev | appgoblin.info/companies/reactnative.dev) – Cross-platform framework
Game Engines
Take away: Unity reigns supreme! For the mobile games, Unity is in 87% of Android games and 70% of iOS games. Though I’ve had trouble nailing down accurate ways to determine when a game was made in iOS with Unreal Engine, the numbers for Android are no where close with <1% of game market share for epic games.
Open source: Godot (godotengine.org | appgoblin.info/companies/godotengine.org) has very few games on the Google Play and iOS store. So far I’ve only found a handful in the top 200 for categories, so hopefully I am missing something, otherwise it seems Godot has not had many breakout hits.
Full List
- Unity3d (unity3d.com | appgoblin.info/companies/unity3d.com) – Game engine
- Cocos (cocos.com | appgoblin.info/companies/cocos.com) – Game engine
- Epic Games (epicgames.com | appgoblin.info/companies/epicgames.com) – Unreal Engine
- Godot (godotengine.org | appgoblin.info/companies/godotengine.org)
Newer Tools without a good title
Take away: These ones I’m including because I think they’re both interesting new projects and while they are less common now, I have a feeling they will be bigger the next time around:
- Divkit ~2% (divkit.tech | appgoblin.info/companies/divkit.tech) – UI rendering framework.
- Expo ~2% (expo.dev | appgoblin.info/companies/expo.dev) – React Native framework/toolkit