Comparison of Android Web Service and Networking libraries OKHTTP Retrofit and Volley

Question

Two-part question from an iOS developer learning Android  working on an Android project that will make a variety of requests from JSON to image to streaming download of audio and video    On iOS I have used the AFNetworking project extensively  Is there an equivalent library for Android  I ve read up on OkHTTP and Retrofit by Square  as well as Volley but don t yet have experience developing with them  I m hoping someone could provide some concrete examples of best use cases for each  From what I ve read  seems like OkHTTP is the most robust of the three  and could handle the requirements of this project  mentioned above

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RoboSpice Vs  Volley   From https   groups google com forum   topic robospice QwVCfY glOQ   RoboSpice RS  is service based and more respectful of Android philosophy than Volley  Volley is thread based and this is not the way background processing should take place on Android  Ultimately  you can dig down both libs and find that they are quite similar  but our way to do background processing is more Android oriented  it allow us  for instance  to tell users that RS is actually doing something in background  which would be hard for volley  actually it doesn t at all   RoboSpice and volley both offer nice features like prioritization  retry policies  request cancellation  But RS offers more   a more advanced caching and that s a big one  with cache management  request aggregation  more features like repluging to a pending request  dealing with cache expiry without relying on server headers  etc  RoboSpice does more outside of UI Thread   volley will deserialize your POJOs on the main thread  which is horrible to my mind  With RS your app will be more responsive   In terms of speed  we definitely need metrics  RS has gotten super fast now  but still we don t have figure to put here  Volley should theoretically be a bit faster  but RS is now massively parallel    who knows   RoboSpice offers a large compatibility range with extensions  You can use it with okhttp  retrofit  ormlite  beta   jackson  jackson2  gson  xml serializer  google http client  spring android    Quite a lot  Volley can be used with ok http and uses gson  that s it  Volley offers more UI sugar that RS  Volley provides NetworkImageView  RS does provide a spicelist adapter  In terms of feature it s not so far  but I believe Volley is more advanced on this topic  More than 200 bugs have been solved in RoboSpice since its initial release  It s pretty robust and used heavily in production  Volley is less mature but its user base should be growing fast  Google effect   RoboSpice is available on maven central  Volley is hard to find

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AFNetworking for Android   Fast Android Networking is here   Fast Android Networking Library supports all types of HTTP HTTPS request like GET  POST  DELETE  HEAD  PUT  PATCH  Fast Android Networking Library supports downloading any type of file  Fast Android Networking Library supports uploading any type of file  supports multipart upload   Fast Android Networking Library supports cancelling a request  Fast Android Networking Library supports setting priority to any request  LOW  MEDIUM  HIGH  IMMEDIATE   Fast Android Networking Library supports RxJava  As it uses OkHttp as a networking layer  it supports   Fast Android Networking Library supports HTTP 2 support allows all requests to the same host to share a socket  Fast Android Networking Library uses connection pooling which reduces request latency  if HTTP 2 isn   t available   Transparent GZIP shrinks download sizes  Fast Android Networking Library supports response caching which avoids the network completely for repeat requests  Thanks  The library is created by me

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I ve recently found a lib called ion that brings a little extra to the table    ion has built-in support for image download integrated with ImageView  JSON  with the help of GSON   files and a very handy UI threading support   I m using it on a new project and so far the results have been good  Its use is much simpler than Volley or Retrofit

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Async HTTP client loopj vs  Volley  The specifics of my project are small HTTP REST requests  every 1-5 minutes   I using an async HTTP client  1 4 1  for a long time  The performance is better than using the vanilla Apache httpClient or an HTTP URL connection  Anyway  the new version of the library is not working for me  library inter exception cut chain of callbacks   Reading all answers motivated me to try something new  I have chosen the Volley HTTP library   After using it for some time  even without tests  I see clearly that the response time is down to 1 5x  2x Volley   Maybe Retrofit is better than an async HTTP client  I need to try it  But I m sure that Volley is not for me

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Retrofit 1 9 0 vs  RoboSpice I am using both in my app  Robospice works faster than Retrofit whenever I parse the nested JSON class  Because Spice Manger will do everything for you  In Retrofit you need to create GsonConverter and deserialize it  I created two fragments in the same activity and called the same time with two same kind of URLs  09-23 20 12 32 830  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E RETROFIT    RestAdapter Init 09-23 20 12 32 833  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E RETROFIT  calling the method 09-23 20 12 32 837  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E ROBOSPICE  initialzig spice manager 09-23 20 12 32 860  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E ROBOSPICE  Executing the method 09-23 20 12 33 537  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E ROBOSPICE  on SUcceess 09-23 20 12 33 553  16002-16002 com urbanpro seeker E ROBOSPICE  gettting the all contents 09-23 20 12 33 601  16002-21819 com urbanpro seeker E RETROFIT  deseriazation starts 09-23 20 12 33 603  16002-21819 com urbanpro seeker E RETROFIT  deseriazation ends

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And yet another option  https   github com apptik jus   It is modular like Volley  but more extended and documentation is improving  supporting different HTTP stacks and converters out of the box It has a module to generate server API interface mappings like Retrofit It also has JavaRx support   And many other handy features like markers  transformers  etc

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Just to add a bit to the discussion from my experience working with Volley    Volley does not handle streaming uploads or downloads in any sense  That is  the entire request body has to be in memory and you cannot use an OutputStream to write the request body to the underlying socket  nor can you use an InputStream to read the response body  as basic HttpURLConnection does  So  Volley is a poor choice for uploading or downloading large files  Your requests and responses should be small  This is one of the biggest limitations of Volley that I have personally encountered  For what it s worth  OkHttp does have interfaces for working with streams  The lack of official documentation is annoying  although I have been able to work around that by reading the source code  which is pretty easy to follow  What is more bothersome is that  as far as I can tell  Volley has no official release versions and no Maven or Gradle artifact  and therefore managing it as a dependency becomes more of a headache than  say  any of the libraries Square has released  You just clone a repo  build a jar  and you re on your own  Looking for a bug fix  Fetch and hope it s there  You might get some other stuff  too  it won t be documented  In my opinion  this effectively means that Volley is an unsupported 3rd party library  even though the code base is reasonably active  Caveat emptor  As a nit  having the Content-Type tied to the class request type  JsonObjectRequest  ImageRequest  etc   is kind of awkward and reduces the flexibility of the calling code a bit  as you are tied to Volley s existing Request type hierarchy  I like the straightforwardness of just setting Content-Type as a header like any other  don t do this with Volley  by the way  you ll end up with two Content-Type headers    That s just my personal opinion  though  and it can be worked around    That is not to say that Volley does not have some useful features  It certainly does  Easily customizable retry policies  transparent caching  a cancellation API  and support for request scheduling and concurrent connections are great features  Just know that it s not intended for all HTTP use cases  see item 1 above   and that there are some headaches involved in putting Volley into production use in your app  item 2

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I m hoping someone can provide some concrete examples of best use cases for each    Use Retrofit if you are communicating with a Web service  Use the peer library Picasso if you are downloading images  Use OkHTTP if you need to do HTTP operations that lie outside of Retrofit Picasso   Volley roughly competes with Retrofit   Picasso  On the plus side  it is one library  On the minus side  it is one undocumented  an unsupported   throw the code over the wall and do an I O presentation on it  library   EDIT - Volley is now officially supported by Google  Kindly refer Google Developer Guide     From what I ve read  seems like OkHTTP is the most robust of the 3   Retrofit uses OkHTTP automatically if available  There is a Gist from Jake Wharton that connects Volley to OkHTTP      and could handle the requirements of this project  mentioned above     Probably you will use none of them for  streaming download of audio and video   by the conventional definition of  streaming   Instead  Android s media framework will handle those HTTP requests for you   That being said  if you are going to attempt to do your own HTTP-based streaming  OkHTTP should handle that scenario  I don t recall how well Volley would handle that scenario  Neither Retrofit nor Picasso are designed for that

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Adding to the accepted answer and what LOG TAG said    for Volley to parse your data in a background thread you must subclass Request lt YourClassName gt  as the onResponse method is called on the main thread and parsing on the main thread may cause the UI to lag if your response is big  Read here on how to do that

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Looking at the Volley perspective here are some advantages for your requirement   Volley  on one hand  is totally focused on handling individual  small HTTP requests  So if your HTTP request handling has some quirks  Volley probably has a hook for you  If  on the other hand  you have a quirk in your image handling  the only real hook you have is ImageCache   It   s not nothing  but it   s not a lot   either   but it has more other advantages like Once you define your requests  using them from within a fragment or activity is painless unlike parallel AsyncTasks  Pros and cons of Volley   So what   s nice about Volley    The networking part isn   t just for images  Volley is intended to be an integral part of your back end  For a fresh project based off of a simple REST service  this could be a big win  NetworkImageView is more aggressive about request cleanup than Picasso  and more conservative in its GC usage patterns  NetworkImageView relies exclusively on strong memory references  and cleans up all request data as soon as a new request is made for an ImageView  or as soon as that ImageView moves offscreen  Performance  This post won   t evaluate this claim  but they   ve clearly taken some care to be judicious in their memory usage patterns  Volley also makes an effort to batch callbacks to the main thread to reduce context switching  Volley apparently has futures  too  Check out RequestFuture if you   re interested  If you   re dealing with high-resolution compressed images  Volley is the only solution here that works well  Volley can be used with Okhttp  New version of Okhttp supports NIO for better performance   Volley plays nice with the Activity life cycle     Problems With Volley  Since Volley is new  few things are not supported yet  but it s fixed    Multipart Requests  Solution  https   github com vinaysshenoy enhanced-volley  status code 201 is taken as an error   Status code from 200 to 207 are successful responses now  Fixed  https   github com Vinayrraj CustomVolley   Update  in latest release of Google volley  the 2XX Status codes bug is fixed now Thanks to Ficus Kirkpatrick  it s less documented but many of the people are supporting volley in github  java like documentation can be found here   On android developer website  you may find guide for Transmitting Network Data Using Volley  And volley source code can be found at Google Git To solve change Redirect Policy of Volley Framework use  Volley with OkHTTP  CommonsWare mentioned above     Also you can read this Comparing Volley s image loading with Picasso  Retrofit   It s released by Square  This offers very easy to use REST API s  Update  Voila  with NIO support   Pros of Retrofit    Compared to Volley  Retrofit s REST API code is brief and provides excellent API documentation and has good support in communities  It is very easy to add into the projects  We can use it with any serialization library  with error handling    Update   - There are plenty of very good changes in Retrofit 2 0 0-beta2   version 1 6 of Retrofit with OkHttp 2 0 is now dependent on Okio to support java io and java nio which makes it much easier to access  store and process your data using ByteString and Buffer to do some clever things to save CPU and memory   FYI  This reminds me of the Koush s OIN library with NIO support   We can use Retrofit together with RxJava to combine and chain REST calls using rxObservables to avoid ugly callback chains  to avoid callback hell        Cons of Retrofit for version 1 6    Memory related error handling functionality is not good  in older versions of Retrofit OkHttp  not sure if it s improved with the Okio with Java NIO support   Minimum threading assistance can result call back hell if we use this in an improper way     All above Cons have been solved in the new version of Retrofit 2 0 beta                                                                              Update   Android Async vs Volley vs Retrofit performance benchmarks  milliseconds  lower value is better       FYI above Retrofit Benchmarks info will improve with java NIO support because the new version of OKhttp is dependent on NIO Okio library         In all three tests with varying repeats  1     25 times   Volley was   anywhere from 50  to 75  faster  Retrofit clocked in at an impressive   50  to 90  faster than the AsyncTasks  hitting the same endpoint the   same number of times  On the Dashboard test suite  this translated   into loading parsing the data several seconds faster  That is a   massive real-world difference  In order to make the tests fair  the   times for AsyncTasks Volley included the JSON parsing as Retrofit does   it for you automatically       RetroFit Wins in benchmark test       In the end  we decided to go with Retrofit for our application  Not   only is it ridiculously fast  but it meshes quite well with our   existing architecture  We were able to make a parent Callback   Interface that automatically performs error handling  caching  and   pagination with little to no effort for our APIs  In order to merge in   Retrofit  we had to rename our variables to make our models GSON   compliant  write a few simple interfaces  delete functions from the   old API  and modify our fragments to not use AsyncTasks  Now that we   have a few fragments completely converted  it   s pretty painless  There   were some growing pains and issues that we had to overcome  but   overall it went smoothly  In the beginning  we ran into a few   technical issues bugs  but Square has a fantastic Google  community   that was able to help us through it    When to use Volley     We can use Volley when we need to load images as well as consuming REST APIs   network call queuing system is needed for many n w request at the same time  also Volley has better memory related error handling than Retrofit   OkHttp can be used with Volley  Retrofit uses OkHttp by default  It has SPDY support  connection pooling  disk caching  transparent compression  Recently  it has got some support of java NIO with Okio library   Source  credit  volley-vs-retrofit by Mr  Josh Ruesch  Note  About streaming it depends on what type of streaming you want like RTSP RTCP

[android] Comparison of Android Web Service and Networking libraries: OKHTTP, Retrofit and Volley

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