As users continue to rapidly increase their mobile engagement, companies in every industry have adopted mobile strategies throughout their products. It’s safe to say mobile is now standard practice for even the most incumbent, large companies, especially as mobile teams continue to pop up and expand.

But even the most advanced mobile PMs don’t go it alone—they rely on SDKs to help make their work quicker and more efficient. A software development kit (or SDK) is a set of development tools that allow for easier creation of software packages within your mobile experience. There are endless SDKs mobile PMs can use to help reach their goals, but we were curious about which SDKs are the most popular.

We recently surveyed over 200 mobile product managers to list the five SDKs they can’t live without, and their responses were vast! Below are the most popular responses from our survey, broken down by category.

Ads and monetization

Ad Colony
AdColony is a premium mobile video ad network and monetization solution. They help elevate mobile advertising by focusing on the highest quality consumer experiences that deliver outcomes for brands and publishers.

Advangelists
Advangelists is an advertising and marketing ecosystem delivering our partners brand message in the right place, at the right time, to the right human. They believe that advertising should be an amalgamation of great features, great usability and should have all the tools you need in one single platform.

Chartboost
Chartboost is a mobile game discovery and monetization platform. The company, which acts as a business engine for mobile games, allows video game developers to create customized interstitial and video ads, promote new games, and swap traffic with one another.

Facebook
Millions of businesses, big and small, use the Facebook family of apps and services to connect with real people on any device.

Tapjoy
Tapjoy’s platform drives peak performance for the world’s top brands and highest-grossing app developers. Their mobile marketing automation platform helps publishers monetize mobile freemium apps.

Crash reporting and testing

Crashlytics
Crashlytics gives you powerful crash reporting. Mobile developers for iOS, Android, and Unity are able to pinpoint, down to the exact line of code, the issues that causes their app’s instabilities.

HockeyApp
HockeyApp is a service for app developers to support them in various aspects of their development process, including the management and recruitment of testers, the distribution of apps and the collection of crash reports. It allows you to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage.

Telerik
Telerik empowers its customers to create compelling app experiences across any screen. Their end-to-end platform uniquely combines industry-leading UI tools with cloud services to simplify the entire app development lifecycle.

Development

Android Studio
Android Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Google that provides developers with tools needed to build applications for the Android OS platform. Android Studio is available for download on Windowsv, Mac, and Linux.

AngularJS
AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps. It lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. AngularJS’s data binding and dependency injection eliminate much of the code you would otherwise have to write.

AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

Bolts
Bolts is a collection of low-level libraries designed to make developing mobile apps easier.

Cordova
Apache Cordova is an open-source mobile development framework. It allows you to use standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) for cross-platform development. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device’s capabilities such as sensors, data, network status, etc.

Fabric
Fabric is a platform that helps your mobile team build better apps, understand your users, and grow your business. It offers award-winning services and partner integrations that you can mix and match to suit your needs.

Firebase
Firebase Cloud Messaging (formerly known as Google Cloud Messaging) is a cross-platform solution for messages and notifications for Android, iOS, and web applications, which currently can be used at no cost.

Ionic
Ionic is a powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Ionic is focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app.

Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a proprietary cross-platform source code editor with a Python application programming interface (API). It natively supports many programming languages and markup languages, and functions can be added by users with plugins, typically community-built and maintained under free-software licenses.

Syncfusion
Syncfusion is a technological innovation hub for software component development. Their mission is to make software frameworks and pre-built software available to every business on the planet at a great price with the fewest possible licensing restrictions.

Unity
Unity is one among the Microsoft Application Blocks. It is an IOC container by Microsoft, which helps in easy object creation and de-coupling the module dependencies in your project

Xamarin
With a C#-shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms, including Windows and macOS.

Xcode
The Xcode suite includes most of Apple’s developer documentation, and built-in Interface Builder, an application used to construct graphical user interfaces.

Mobile engagement and customer feedback

Apptentive
Apptentive’s mobile customer engagement software helps companies listen to, engage with, and retain their customers. Integrated into thousands of mobile apps, Apptentive helps companies engage mobile customers, boost app ratings, drive downloads, and earn customer loyalty through in-app messaging, native surveys, customer feedback, ratings prompts, and customer support.

Kochava
Kochava creates real-time user tracking and attribution analytics tools for mobile advertising. Kochava simplifies your audience search with custom-tailored audience models for any media outlet, including popular platforms like Facebook.

Localytics
Localytics is a leading mobile engagement platform. They give companies the insights and tools they need to improve their mobile app acquisition, engagement and retention efforts.

MixPanel
Mixpanel is a business analytics service and company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them. Its toolset contains in-app A/B tests and user survey forms.

SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey provides free online questionnaire and survey software, and allows you to create and publish online surveys in minutes, along with viewing results graphically and in real time.. They’ve built a suite of products specifically designed to help you collect and understand data from your customers, your employees, or your target market.

Urban Airship
Urban Airship provides a mobile engagement platform and digital wallet solution.

Mobile marketing and analytics

Adjust
Adjust is the mobile attribution provider of choice for thousands of app creators around the world. Their business intelligence platform combines attribution for advertising sources with advanced in-app analytics and store statistics for deep marketing insights.

Adobe
Adobe Mobile Services brings together mobile marketing capabilities for mobile applications from across the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which allows you to understand and improve user engagement with your mobile applications.

AppSee
Appsee enables mobile app publishers and developers to track, understand, and improve the user experience in their apps, and act on insights. Appsee is being used by thousands of customers to optimize their mobile apps and advance their business.

Appsflyer
AppsFlyer is a SaaS mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform. It helps marketers to pinpoint their targeting, optimize their ad spend, and boost their ROI.

Branch
Branch helps mobile apps grow with deep links that power referral systems, sharing links, invites, and Quick Links with full attribution and analytics.

Comscore
ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers.

Flurry
Flurry is a mobile analytics, monetization, and advertising company. The company develops and markets a platform for analyzing consumer interactions with mobile applications, solutions for marketers to advertise in-apps, as well as a service for applying monetization structures to mobile apps.

TUNE
TUNE is a mobile analytics and performance marketing software to manage campaigns, engage the right audiences, and grow your business. By tapping into the TUNE Marketing Console, marketers get access to Attribution Analytics, In-App Marketing, App Store Analytics, and Business Intelligence for all their mobile marketing needs.

Upsight
Upsight is the a large enterprise-grade user lifecycle management platform. Their customers leverage their consolidated solution stack to learn about their users, make informed decisions and take immediate action to positively impact KPIs, increase LTV, and add value to their businesses.

Performance monitoring

Apteligent
Apteligent is a mobile application intelligence solution providing both tools and app performance insights for mobile developers and product managers and mobile ecosystem performance data.

New Relic
New Relic gives you deep performance analytics for every part of your software environment. You can easily view and analyze massive amounts of data, and gain actionable insights in real-time.

Learn more

Interested in learning more about mobile product management? Grab a copy of our free guide Mobile Product Management: New Trends and Data for 2017.