Interested in mobile game development? Want to find out which SDKs are commonly used among top game apps? If so, you are welcome to take a look at our curated list of most common SDKs among top 100 game apps in the Google Play Store. Knowing each and every SDK in this list will empower every mobile game developer. Being aware of what tools are available brings developers much closer to building great apps.
Before we start, let’s get into the basics first for beginners. If you have enough knowledge about the SDK world, you can directly jump into the lists, skipping the following part.
What is an SDK?
SDK stands for software development kit. They are basically shortcuts for app developers, providing functionality that would otherwise take a lot of time to code. If your app is going to make it big, it is likely that you are going to implement SDKs in your app here and there. SDKs are created for apps to succeed!
We have curated the SDKs that have been currently used by the game apps in the Top 100 Free category in the Google Play Store. The data is from Mobile Action’s SDK Intelligence tool.
There are different SDKs for different purposes. Among the most common use cases for implementing an SDK, advertising and development aid are the biggest categories for SDKs. Let’s start by game engines.
Game Engine
You need to pick a game engine for your app. Well, here are the three popular game engines used.
Development Aid
Apart from a game engine, your app would need all sorts of features demanding all sorts of development aids. A huge list of development aid SDKs came up during our analysis. If you are new to game app development or if you are already developing games for android, it is very useful to know what tools are out there to help you develop great apps. This list excludes native SDKs that have been used by almost all the apps such as XML PULL, Android Package Management, Android Support, and Google Mobile Services. Following is a list of other most commonly used ones.
Advertisement
You will need to make money at the end of the day. In case your app is free and without in-app purchases, Advertisement SDKs will help you monetize your app with advertising. Here is the list of the most popular advertisement SDKs. But keep in mind that our sample includes free apps only. Therefore, the percentages are highly likely to be biased (bigger than usual) compared to paid apps.
Mobile Analytics
Mobile Analytics SDKs help you collect insights about how your users interact with your app. It is almost essential for any app to collect usage data, and SDKs make this so much easier.
Social Network
Either take it as a fun fact or not, %93 percent of the top 100 free game apps use Facebook’s SDK. This means around %90 of those apps use Facebook login.
Payment
Interestingly, payment SDKs are not popular among top free game apps. This aligns with the fact that Advertisement SDKs are wildly popular in this category, as seen by the list above. Only one payment SDK was popular enough to be considered mentioning: Amazon Payment services, which was implemented by merely %7 of the apps in the top games charts.
Final Note
We hope that readers benefit from knowing what SDKs are available for mobile game development. This is not an exhaustive list as we have omitted the SDKs that were not used by more than %10 of the apps, which we have considered for this study. Once again, our sample of apps was the top 100 free game apps in Google Play Store.
All data is sourced from Mobile Action’s SDK Intelligence tool. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to schedule a demo with us. Our team would be more than happy to answer your questions and help you out.
-Author: Ömer Sakarya
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