Mobile SDKs: What They Really Do to Your Mobile App
August 17, 2017

Shlomi Gian
PacketZoom

Mobile SDKs (software developments kits); love them or hate them, they're here to stay. They provide our apps with all sorts of functionality that would be incredibly time consuming to build, and they give us another means to monetize our apps. Third party SDKs are in fact, quite popular.

According to a study done by SafeDK, on average each Android app uses nearly 18 third party SDKs. That number is even higher for mobile games. While it would be difficult to argue that SDKs aren’t useful, it’s also hard for developers to get a good idea of the amount of resources used by each SDK once the app is in production.


What makes a good SDK? Some of the common factors to consider while judging the quality of an SDK are functionality, ease of use, and documentation. Some other attributes to consider are CPU usage, effect on battery, playing nice with other SDKs, and even network data usage.

As mentioned, each Android app uses 18 third party SDKs on average. It therefore is very important for all SDKs to function in harmony. The effect on CPU, battery and data consumed per session are all also important for apps because each of these could lead to users uninstalling the app. Let’s discuss data consumed per session. This is an important factor when you consider users who have limited data plans.

So how does one know which SDK is consuming the most data per session? What are the number of transfers per session? There are a number of ways you can look at the traffic requests made by various SDKs. You could route the app traffic through a proxy, run the app on your test device and see what’s happening, but unfortunately this will only show you the results of your own individual tests, giving you an idea of performance, but likely a statistically insignificant answer. Another way is to use a Mobile Application Monitoring tool. This gives you a whole suite of tools and the results would be from real productions users. The downside here is that it can get very pricey.

We often hear from mobile app developers about the need for an analytics product that would provide all the statistics for third party data transfers and would be able to capture the specific domains and URLs that are causing the largest amount of data consumption.

The chart below is from a gaming app with traffic mostly in the US and Canada with ~10K DAU (Daily Active Users). Like many mobile games, this app also relies on ads for a large portion of its revenue. Hence the preponderance of ad SDKs in its list of data consumers.

In the chart, both "vid.applovin" and "edge.adcolony" are ad SDKs, but each one has different data size per session (~13Kb and ~10Kb respectively). This simply could be because vid.applovin is serving more ads compared edge.adcolony because that is how the developer prioritized their ads, or it could have something to do with the frequency that the ad content is refreshed or the size of the individual ads. What you do get is greater insight into what the SDKs in your app are actually doing.

You should think about this as you consider which SDKs to include in your app. Mobile data is expensive (and frequently slow) for users, especially in developing countries. As app developers, it makes sense to to keep an eye on data usage metrics to accommodate a global user base.


In conclusion, there’s a real need for app developers to collect detailed network performance statistics about their apps. To be efficient, that solution would need to be:

1. Designed from the ground up for mobile applications with Real User Monitoring (RUM)

2. Lightweight in its metrics collection (i.e SDK uses just one UDP packet).

A smart SDK should be FREE and also allow developers to compare their app performance with industry references (benchmarks) and automatically optimize their code at run-time based on thousands of different network types, locations and times faced by their apps.

Shlomi Gian is CEO of PacketZoom
Share this

Industry News

April 02, 2025

Kong announced the launch of the latest version of Kong AI Gateway, which introduces new features to provide the AI security and governance guardrails needed to make GenAI and Agentic AI production-ready.

April 02, 2025

Traefik Labs announced significant enhancements to its AI Gateway platform along with new developer tools designed to streamline enterprise AI adoption and API development.

April 02, 2025

Zencoder released its next-generation AI coding and unit testing agents, designed to accelerate software development for professional engineers.

April 02, 2025

Windsurf (formerly Codeium) and Netlify announced a new technology partnership that brings seamless, one-click deployment directly into the developer's integrated development environment (IDE.)

April 02, 2025

Opsera raised $20M in Series B funding.

April 02, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, is making significant updates to its certification offerings.

April 01, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the Golden Kubestronaut program, a distinguished recognition for professionals who have demonstrated the highest level of expertise in Kubernetes, cloud native technologies, and Linux administration.

April 01, 2025

Red Hat announced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat Developer Hub, Red Hat’s enterprise-grade internal developer portal based on the Backstage project.

April 01, 2025

Platform9 announced that Private Cloud Director Community Edition is generally available.

March 31, 2025

Sonatype expanded support for software development in Rust via the Cargo registry to the entire Sonatype product suite.

March 31, 2025

CloudBolt Software announced its acquisition of StormForge, a provider of machine learning-powered Kubernetes resource optimization.

March 31, 2025

Mirantis announced the k0rdent Application Catalog – with 19 validated infrastructure and software integrations that empower platform engineers to accelerate the delivery of cloud-native and AI workloads wherever the\y need to be deployed.

March 31, 2025

Traefik Labs announced its Kubernetes-native API Management product suite is now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

March 27, 2025

webAI and MacStadium(link is external) announced a strategic partnership that will revolutionize the deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence models using Apple's cutting-edge silicon technology.

March 27, 2025

Development work on the Linux kernel — the core software that underpins the open source Linux operating system — has a new infrastructure partner in Akamai. The company's cloud computing service and content delivery network (CDN) will support kernel.org, the main distribution system for Linux kernel source code and the primary coordination vehicle for its global developer network.