This time of year is often associated with greeting cards and chocolate, but the team at Raizlabs is showing the love by opting out of flowers and into sharing our favorite tools. We love developing impactful products that change lives. Our favorite tools help us spend more time writing code, and less time in the spaces in-between. Check out some of our favorites for iOS and Android:

iOS

Distribution

Profiles, certificates, signing, distribution are among our least-enjoyable tasks to work on. These tools allow us to automate our testing, beta distributions, and app store submissions:

• CircleCI
  Offload building, testing, and distributing your code to Circle and never fight with your build server again.

• Fastlane
  Easy-to-write scripts for everything iOS distribution: deployment, beta builds, testing, app screenshots, etc. Makes a great team with Circle and Hockey.
• HockeyApp
  Straightforward and dependable beta distribution.

Organization

Effective organization helps developers spend less getting oriented and more time coding. These tools allow us to enforce filesystem, style, and naming conventions that enable a consistent environment from project to project:

• Synx
  Keep your Xcode groups and the backing file organization structure in sync.
• Swiftlint
  Enforce your team’s style conventions with the Xcode compiler to reduce needless code review back-and-forth.
• Swiftgen
  Generate namespaced and autocompleting enums from Localizable.strings files.

Raizlabs Open Source

We have over 50 Open Source iOS libraries hosted on our GitHub! Here are a couple of our favorites:

• Anchorage
  Simple, expressive layout code built directly on top of the NSLayoutAnchor API.
• BonMot
  Expressive, composable attributed string library that makes it easy to work with Apple’s powerful typography tools.

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Android

Workflow

Workflow tools can both increase productivity and enforce convention. These are some of our favorite team adoptions, which enable us to spend more time writing good code.

• Kotlin
  An expressive, safe, and modern programming language. Open Source and awesome.
• ADB Idea Plugin
  A collection of handy app deployment tools.
• Android Studio Live Templates
  Enables one word autocomplete for dynamic templates of code.

Working with Devices

These tools help combine the convenience of working with an emulator with the functional parity of debugging on a physical device.

• Vysor
  Ditch the emulator. Interact with your android device with your mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
• ADB Wifi Plugin
  Quickly connect your Android device over WiFi to install, run and debug your applications without a USB connected.

Profiling

These profiling tools allow us to proactively identify issues and performance bottlenecks before the app reaches the users:

• Dexcount Gradle Plugin
  Keep tabs on the growth of your app, and stay under the method-reference limit.
• Leak Canary
  Automatic memory leak detection for debug builds.

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General Workflow

These tools help us communicate, collaborate, and get stuff done:

• Github
  Powerful version control repository that makes internal and external collaboration delightful.
• Zeplin
  Pixel-perfect comps, an asset library, style guide, and communication channel, all combined in one. Reduce design review back-and-forth.
• Kaleidoscope
  Right-click to diff text from any source against text from anywhere else. Works with images too!

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What Are We Missing?

Are there any must-have development, workflow, or productivity tools that we have to try out? Let us know in the comments! Want to team up? Get in touch.