Swift Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024 for iOS and macOS

Swift community chose the best libraries of the year: 2024 results

The annual vote among Swift developers has concluded. Thousands of iOS and macOS engineers from around the world selected the most useful and innovative libraries that simplify app development for the Apple ecosystem. We have compiled a list of winners in key categories — from networking to animation.

🏆 Best networking library

The perennial leader of recent years — Alamofire — is at the top again. This elegant wrapper over URLSession offers a convenient interface for HTTP requests, file downloads, and response handling. Thanks to active community support and compatibility with async/await, Alamofire remains the de facto standard for networking in Swift.

🏆 Best UI and animation library

In the user interface category, Lottie (can be integrated via Swift Package Manager) won. This library from Airbnb allows playing Adobe After Effects animations in real time without performance loss. Developers noted that Lottie significantly speeds up the creation of complex transitions and visual effects.

🏆 Best data library

First place was taken by Realm — a mobile database optimized for iOS and macOS. Unlike Core Data, Realm offers a simple object model, automatic synchronization via MongoDB Realm Sync, and excellent performance. The winner is especially useful for offline applications and projects with high read/write loads.

🏆 Best testing library

The community preferred Nimble — a framework for writing readable assertions and matchers. Paired with Quick (an RSpec analogue), it allows creating clear tests in natural language. Nimble supports both synchronous and asynchronous testing, which is critical for modern Swift projects with Combine and async/await.

🏆 Best background tasks library

The winner was BackgroundTasks — an official solution from Apple that replaced outdated mechanisms like beginBackgroundTask. The library allows scheduling background updates, synchronization, and data processing without the risk of App Store rejection. Developers noted the API flexibility and ease of integration with iOS 13+.

🏆 Best image library

Gold went to Kingfisher — a powerful library for downloading and caching images. It supports progressive loading, client-side processing (resizing, filters), and integration with SwiftUI via AsyncImage. Kingfisher saves hours of development by automatically managing memory and disk cache.

📊 Trends of the year

• SwiftUI and Combine — most winners actively support these frameworks, confirming the community's shift from UIKit to declarative interfaces.
• Swift Package Manager — all libraries are now distributed via SPM, simplifying dependency installation and updates.
• Asynchrony — almost all tools have been updated to work with async/await, making code cleaner and safer.

The full list of nominees and voting results are available on the official Swift community website. If you develop for iOS or macOS, we recommend taking a closer look at these libraries — they will save you time and improve the quality of your code.

Source: data