Part of that comes from the changing nature of these terms, with strong legacies and nuances behind each phrase. To help answer some of those objections, I asked engineers both at Urban Airship and outside of the company how they might respond. At the most basic level, good SDKs support engineering efforts and scale to your needs.
On iOS, this is done by framework linking in Xcode and depends on the build settings; ProGuard can manage this on Android. Marketers and mobile product managers should work with their dev teams to clearly articulate the features and use cases they want to deploy. From day one, our SDK helps you capture data and segment audiences by device property tags , reducing some development work. You can download and assess our SDK s test the file size impact on your app based on the features implemented, or check out our version history on GitHub.
Our SDK is broadly used, with more than 40, unique app installs. The best SDKs are those that make life simple for anyone who needs to use them. These have long been used to enable apps to communicate with one another, facilitating integration in a similar way to an SDK. But software development kits go one step further than standard APIs.
With an SDK, developers have all the information they need to build an app that communicates seamlessly with other platforms. There are many advantages of SDKs which will appeal to marketing professionals.
The kits make it easier for development teams to create quality apps that integrate flawlessly. So marketers can get apps launched and in the hands of their customers quicker than their competitors, thereby capturing a greater market share.
There are cost savings to be made by using direct SDKs, as any development time required is dramatically reduced. Using SDKs can also impact the performance of an app, making it less likely that an app will crash unexpectedly. This will also help ensure a line of communication between developers and users, which is paramount to a healthy user interaction and user experience in general.
If your userbase is primarily concerned with open source forking, security, and development, having your SDK published utilizing GitHub and its associated repositories as an open-source project can ensure excellent results. Alternately, if your API is closed down or otherwise requires privacy of codebase, then it makes more sense to utilize a proprietary SDK and documentation methodology, with the understanding that this comes with certain caveats and expectations should be measured.
Developers should also consider publishing in an offline-friendly way, allowing for documentation and SDK perusal without an internet connection. This can be done in a variety of ways, as complex as a purpose-built desktop application down to the most simple PDF file. Regardless of the method, this should be considered dependent on your userbase and their specific needs, and the stipulations of your platform policies.
The various methods, systems, integrations, and offerings from the API creator are not only present as they are in the API itself , they are well-explained and demonstrated — in this way, an SDK offers a set of tools for creation, yes, but also offers a channel of communication that is direct, customizable, and wholly managed by the API provider to explain and describe in their own specific way.
Both a tool for creation and communication, an SDK should be considered a dual-faceted system of extreme importance. Building a poor SDK also ensures that any communication between the developer and the user will likewise be poor, filled with guesswork and extrapolations that may or may not be true. To this end, following the few practices outlined herein will ensure that your SDK, as well as the systems that utilize it, will be as good as it can possibly be. Do you have additional ideas on best practices for building SDKs?
Please comment below! Kristopher is a web developer and author who writes on security and business. He has been writing articles for Nordic APIs since High impact blog posts and eBooks on API business models, and tech advice.
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