2016 was a big year for Swift, with a well-received release of Swift 3.0. There's no doubt that the decision to open-source the language in 2015 strengthened the language. Throughout the year, we saw a number of great libraries in our "This Week in Mobile" series on DZone. Here's a run down of the best of these libraries

LayoutKit

LinkedIn open-sourced LayoutKit, one of their own libraries used in their apps. It's billed as a fast view layout library for iOS, macOS, and tvOS. It's intended to solve the issue of Auto Layout not being performant enough for complicated view hierarchies in scrollable views. If you're building a UICollectionView or UITableView, be sure to check it out here.

ScrollableGraphView

ScrollableGraphView is an adaptive scrollable graph view for iOS to visualize simple discrete datasets with the ability to scroll through the graph. This UI component looks amazing with smooth scrolling and animations. If you're building any app that needs to display data, bring it to the next level with the best graph view library on iOS.

Advance

Advance is a powerful animation framework for iOS, tvOS, and macOS. The framework helps you build gesture-based animations that use physics to reflect the behavior of the real world. Although the developers recommend using the built-in animation libraries for more basic cases, it's worth a look if you need to do something a little special.

Kickstarter

There are so many ways to learn how to build a great app and put the right architecture in place. The best way is to learn from the leaders in the industry. Kickstarter open sourced their iOS and Android apps towards the end of 2016, showing the libraries they depend on, the additional libraries they created and the approaches they take in developing an app.

ExpandingCollection

ExpandingCollection is a card peek and pop controller, released as a showcase of what Ramotion Inc., an app development company can do. Although integrating the library takes a few steps, it all makes perfect sense, and you end up with results like the following image.

15 Days of Animation in Swift

Tutorial series are very popular on GitHub, and this project gives you the opportunity to learn animations in Swift across 11 sample projects. It covers animations that you can use throughout your app such as in the navigation bar, loading dots, stretchy header, circular progress, and GIF animations.

JTAppleCalendar

Listing itself as the "Unofficial Swift Apple Calendar View," JTAppleCalendar is one of the best widgets out there. It allows you to style your date cells however you'd like them to look, select date ranges, and much more. This library sets a high standard for anyone thinking of providing a control for others to use!

Stellar

Stellar is another fantastic physical animation library with a really simple API to express your animations in. The best part of it is that you can observe the completion of each step with promise-style declarations.

StyleKit

While Android developers can easily create common styles for their apps, it's a bit more complicated for iOS developers. Thankfully, StyleKit is here to make it so much easier. It's a microframework that enables you to style your application using a simple JSON file.

IGListKit

If anyone knows a thing or two about list based applications, it's Instagram. They released IGListKit, a data-driven UICollectionView framework for building fast and flexible lists. Written in Objective-C, it has full Swift interop support. Use it to reduce the size of your view controllers and create lists that update really quickly!

Working with Android? We've compiled 2016's top 10 list here.