I notice that no off-the-shelf web view wrappers (e.g. PhoneGap/Cordova) or non-web-view JavaScript frameworks (Titanium, NativeScript) are in this list. Would Xamarin, RoboVM, or RubyMotion be detectable with this method? Or can we safely assume that all of the top 100 apps are native ObjC or Swift?
Interesting sidenote: I saw a reply to this post on Twitter where SourceDNA commented how the makeup of the top 100 apps differs from the long tail of apps:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/SourceDNA/status/652247709655547905" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SourceDNA/status/652247709655547905</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/SourceDNA/status/652247927289544704" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SourceDNA/status/652247927289544704</a><p>"CocoaPods is less popular in the top 100 apps than the long tail. We see ~180K apps with AFNetworking."<p>"CocoaPods more popular in apps that aren't top 100. Top apps more customized, less third-party code."
Scary how many of these are obsolete or outdated.<p>"Bolts-iOS" is a <i>dependency</i> of "facebook-ios-sdk", which means that 19 of the top apps are using an outdated version of the Facebook SDK that predates Bolts, and might be vulnerable.
Here's a curated list of Swift libraries:<p><a href="http://www.ioscookies.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ioscookies.com</a><p>And some cool new Swift/Objective C libraries:<p><a href="https://www.ckl.io/blog/9-trending-objective-c-and-swift-ios-libraries/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ckl.io/blog/9-trending-objective-c-and-swift-ios...</a>
Top libraries for Android apps:<p><a href="http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev" rel="nofollow">http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev</a><p>Top ad network on Android sorted by usage:<p><a href="http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad" rel="nofollow">http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad</a>
Anyone know what is wrong with the table? When I try to highlight text (so I can find out what Flurry-iOS-SDK is) it lets me click, but then scrolls rappidly to the top of the page when I move the mouse to highlight something (Safari on OS X).
This is neat. Someone should get Nate Lawson in here; SourceDNA has this analysis for free and paid apps in both app stores, and he's doing it by bringing up binaries to an IR and doing pattern matching.
Probably of interest as well: a list from CocoaPods of the top SDKs sorted by number of unique apps that have installed them <a href="https://gist.github.com/orta/1c607a2c46545244ab16" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/orta/1c607a2c46545244ab16</a>
Slightly off-topic but we're in the middle of building an iOS / Android SDK / library to drive improved location services.<p>Does anybody have any solid resources on SDK marketing directly to iOS and Android developers?<p>We've found some innovative ways to address the community (doesn't hurt to have an office packed with engineers to ask where they find solutions) but looking for ideas ranging from the best developer events, to publications, to PR agencies focused on devs, to marketing co's etc.<p>I have been surprised how hard it is to turn up prior-art on this subject.
How exactly do you scan these apps though? The only proper way I can think of going about it is to some how bulk download these apps and then go about analysing their code.
For giggles, go into these top 100 apps, and see how many actually properly comply with the open source licenses of many of these libraries (IE they reproduce the proper notices, etc).
We've automated this at MixRank and have analyzed millions of apps over the last couple years.<p>Is there anything of interest HN would like me to look up or blog about?