What is an SDK?
Tags: sdk, webdev, api
Published: 2022-10-26 02:55:56

SDK stands for **Software Development Kit**. It is generally defined as a set of tools enabling a team of developers to create a mobile application. Such a kit consists of helper libraries, relevant documentation, code samples, processes, and guides developers use on specific platforms or programming languages.

Some examples of SDKs are DirectX SDK and .NET SDK (Microsoft), Android SDK (Google), and iPhone SDK (Apple).

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**What is SDK’s purpose?**
SDK is a “shortcut” that makes developers’ work easier using libraries or precompiled modules. This way, they avoid rewriting thousands and thousands of lines of code. They can improve the functionality of mobile apps, such as analytics, advertising, or handle push notifications. Without SDKs, many of these features would have to be developed from scratch, thus requiring more resources and time.

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## What are SDK’s characteristics?
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A mobile SDK must provide value to other companies and their developers; therefore, the company or organization realizing it must deliver a product that should:

– Be easy for other developers to use

– include comprehensive documentation to explain how the code works

– Have enough functionality to add value to other applications

– Do not negatively impact a mobile device’s CPU, battery, or data consumption

– Interact well with other SDKs

To meet these qualities, Software Development Kits typically contain documentation, editors, libraries, runtime and development environments, compilers, debuggers, drivers, network protocols, test examples/projects, and APIs.

## **What’s the difference between SDK and API?**
API stands for Application Programming Interface, a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Live Streaming Video API is a broader term describing a group of similar APIs that work for video.

Compared to the API, SDK acts as a starter kit. The API is the blueprint; the SDK is a package of pre-built elements you can copy, modify, or insert directly into your programming projects. To further break it down, the API for video transmission is a set of instructions, whereas a video streaming SDK consists of examples of valuable ways to use those instructions.

The components of an SDK mentioned earlier simplify the process of going from a multifunctional API to completing a specific coding project.

Therefore, the Software Development Kit extends the API’s functionality; it is a set of tools and code examples that help implement complex operations through an API.

There are many points of contact between SDK and API, and many people tend to overlap the two concepts. The API can be seen as a “minimal” SDK, lacking all the documentation and additional libraries needed, for example, for debugging or library modification and customization. However, these are two very different programming elements from each other.

**What to choose, SDK or API?**
In software development, there is no need to choose between either one. To create a mobile application, you must decide what functionality you need in the application and select the required API to operationalize the functionality. Next, you will choose the suitable SDK to make your application operational in a short time.