OkHttp VS Retrofit

Retrofit in combination with OkHttp for fetching data from server (which hopefully already exists)

OkHttp

Being more familiar with Android development only, I mainly use https://github.com/square/okhttp/tree/master/mockwebserver

Retrofit is the best library that lets you connect to HTTP-based API services from your Android applications. It leverages the OkHttp library’s core functionality, adding a bunch of features to it while eliminating the boilerplate code.

Use Retrofit or anything else that builds on OkHttp. If you do end up needing some features that Cronet supports but OkHttp doesn't (such as HTTP/3), just write an interceptor or use google/cronet-transport-for-okhttp.

Even as of 2022, there are networks out there that have broken/misconfigured IPv6, and there most likely always will be. Some wireless carriers and ISPs support it, but in some cases, people have old or improperly-configured routers and devices. Patchy IPv6 support is less of a problem on iOS and the web these days since those clients have support for dynamically falling back on IPv4 when IPv6 fails. After more research, we realized that Android didn’t have this “dual-stack” IP support, and neither did our preferred networking library, OkHttp. This explained why the content-loading issues only surfaced on Android, and why it took some additional digging to uncover the root cause.

Working with the reddit infrastructure team, we did more testing and built high confidence that this last IPv6 theory was indeed the cause of users’ content-loading problems. We assessed our usage of OkHttp and checked if there were any upcoming plans to improve support. OkHttp did have an open ask for “Happy Eyeballs” #506, but no known plans to implement it. Out of due diligence, we also assessed other network libraries– but knew that moving off OkHttp would be a radical change, indeed. We read the RFC 8305, “Happy Eyeballs algorithm for dual-stack IPv4/IPv6”, and thought “wow, we don’t want to implement this ourselves.” And as we were studying that open OkHttp issue and thinking “If only they would…”

Your app would request data from the backend inside it's domain layer. As the other commenter mentioned, Retrofit is a commonly used library for interfacing with REST APIs, which is built on top of OkHttp (a more generic HTTP client).

OkHttp

Retrofit in combination with OkHttp for fetching data from server (which hopefully already exists)

So I've been playing around with search.maven.org and perhaps I'm not quite understanding it. For example, if I look for Retrofit I'm not seeing anything that resembles retrofit above https://central.sonatype.dev/search?q=Retrofit.

I'm going to hit you with a "it depends" though whether to use ktor or retrofit. If there is any part of you that thinks you're going to support multiplatform, then ktor with no discussion. Retrofit has come out and said that's not on their road map. There is another option called ktorfit which from the name you can guess is like retrofit but built on top of ktor to support multiplatform.

Retrofit

I had a decent experience with Retrofit in the past, but that was a couple of years ago, idk if there are better tools now.

I'm working on networking for my app. So I decided to try out Square's Retrofit. I see that they support simple Callback

Your app would request data from the backend inside it's domain layer. As the other commenter mentioned, Retrofit is a commonly used library for interfacing with REST APIs, which is built on top of OkHttp (a more generic HTTP client).

Retrofit - networking

You'd be better off using Retrofit to request your data and Moshi to parse the JSON. Retrofit has built-in support for rx and coroutines.