Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Android Room VS Retrofit

Compare Android Room VS Retrofit and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Android Room logo Android Room

Learn to use the Room Library

Retrofit logo Retrofit

Retrofit is a type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java.
  • Android Room Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-27
  • Retrofit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-19

Android Room features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Retrofit features and specs

  • Easy to Use
    Retrofit provides a simple and intuitive API for making HTTP requests, making it easy to integrate with your Android applications.
  • Type-Safe HTTP Calls
    With Retrofit, HTTP requests are made using method calls, and responses are automatically converted to Java objects. This type safety helps reduce errors in making network calls.
  • Flexible and Extensible
    Retrofit supports a variety of converters (like Gson, Jackson, Moshi, Protobuf), adapters (like RxJava, Kotlin Coroutines), and other customizations, making it highly adaptable to various needs.
  • Annotation-Based Configuration
    Annotations like @GET, @POST, and @Query make defining APIs more declarative and concise, reducing boilerplate code.
  • Built-In Support for Pagination
    Retrofit's integration with libraries like Paging makes it straightforward to implement paginated data loading.
  • Integration with OkHttp
    Retrofit seamlessly integrates with OkHttp, which provides caching, connection pooling, and HTTP/2 support, thus enhancing performance and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of Retrofit

  • Learning Curve
    While easy to use, it has some initial learning overhead, especially for developers not familiar with annotation-based configuration and asynchronous programming.
  • Verbose Error Handling
    Error handling in Retrofit can be verbose and repetitive if not done correctly, requiring custom solutions for efficient handling of common HTTP errors.
  • Larger APK Size
    Including both Retrofit and its dependencies, such as OkHttp and various converters, can increase the size of your APK, which might be a concern for developers optimizing for smaller app sizes.
  • Complex Configuration for Advanced Use Cases
    For more complex scenarios like custom request/response logging, interceptors, and parsers, configuration can become cumbersome and less straightforward.
  • Default Lack of Built-In Caching
    While OkHttp supports caching, Retrofit does not provide built-in caching out of the box. This requires additional configuration to implement client-side caching effectively.
  • No Built-In WebSocket Support
    Retrofit is mainly designed for RESTful APIs and does not natively support WebSocket communication, requiring additional libraries for such use cases.

Android Room videos

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Retrofit videos

Sep.30 Patch Analysis and Yuudachi Retrofit Review

More videos:

  • Review - Ring Retrofit Alarm Kit Review - Setup and Installation
  • Review - Retrofit Hookah (Optima) Review - EPISODE 9 (RHS)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Android Room and Retrofit)
Databases
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
15 15%
85% 85
NoSQL Databases
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Retrofit might be a bit more popular than Android Room. We know about 29 links to it since March 2021 and only 20 links to Android Room. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Android Room mentions (20)

  • Seven Legacy Technologies in Android Development and Their Modern Counterparts
    For reference, use the official documentation: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/room. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • As a long term Android lover, but also an iOS developer, Android is absolutely miserable to develop for.
    The above snippet of code is just for testing. If everything went correctly, it'll return the URI of the file. However, as for reading in db file, you will have to consult the documentation. I'm guessing this is sqlite? You'll have to add all the dependencies for that in your project. Https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/room. Source: about 2 years ago
  • I am new here and overwhelmed by my app development options. I am proficient in python but warry of its GUI capabilities. Any advice?
    You can use ExoPlayer and its out-of-the-box UI components for this purpose. In order to save text annotations, you can query the current position from the player instance. Then you can use a database like Room to save it. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Room and Compose Version incompatible?
    While I try to use Room, I refer to https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/room, which require. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What language / sdk to use for android app?
    It's been sometime since I've done some dev for android, but at the time I remember that Room was what all the cool kids were using. It's basically a wrapper around SQLite. Source: over 2 years ago
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Retrofit mentions (29)

  • Energy-Efficient Schema-Driven Development with Spring WebMVC/WebFlux
    At first, I thought it was just a knockoff of Retrofit (sorry...), but it turns out you can also use it as a controller interface. The *Exchange annotations in the earlier example come from this HTTP Interface. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Using Retrofit Interceptors to check network connection in Android and testing it
    From this point on, I will assume, you have a basic understanding of Retrofit. To get the most out of this tutorial I would actually suggest you have a retrofit client already implemented in your application. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Lets make a Twitch Android app. Part 1. App access tokens
    Now you might think that in order to make the request we are going to use Retrofit but in reality we are going to be sending out an implicit intent like so:. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Using OAuth2.0 and Retrofit to talk to the GitHub api on Android
    This particular blog post will be us building on the information from the previous blog post and using the authorization code from the GitHub OAuth API in combination with Retrofit. To finally get a access token, which allows us to make requests to the API on a behalf of a user. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Show HN: Turn Your APIs into Swift Protocols
    Hey HN! If you're a fan of Swift you may have noticed that with WWDC 2023 came the (beta) release of macros. They're super powerful and expressive! I've been wishing Swift had a [Retrofit](https://square.github.io/retrofit/) style API definition library for years, and with macros it seemed like this was now possible. I'd like to show you all Papyrus, a library that turns your APIs into type-safe Swift protocols.... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Android Room and Retrofit, you can also consider the following products

PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

CouchDB - HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and peer-based replication

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.