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For applications like facebook, they provide SDK . I have used many third party libraries for different requirements. What is the difference between both the cases . That is the code bundled as library or as sdk

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A Library is a chunk of code that you can call from your own code, to help you do things more quickly/easily. For example, a Bitmap Processing library will provide facilities for loading and manipulating bitmap images, saving you having to write all that code for yourself.

An SDK (software development kit) is a library (often with extra tool applications, data files and sample code) that aid you in developing code that uses a particular system (e.g. extension code for using features of an operating system (Windows SDK), drawing 3D graphics via a particular system (DirectX SDK), writing add-ins to extend other applications (Office SDK), or writing code to make a device like an Arduino or a mobile phone do what you want)

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Alejandro Cumpa
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  • It really sounds the same. Can you explain more ? – Rohit Singh Dec 11 '17 at 06:12
  • A library tends to be a small isolated set of functionality, like a math library. An SDK doesn't always include the code that it interfaces to, and recently that seems to be the most common usage: The Facebook SDK, for instance, is a library of code that facilitates interacting with Facebook. In that case most of Facebook's code lives on a server, and the SDK is just a set of tools to use to talk to the server. An SDK can also be for interacting with an OS (the Android SDK) or a game engine (Unreal Engine SDK). – Alejandro Cumpa Dec 12 '17 at 18:38
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Android SDK -> is the core features and software tools that allow you to create an app for the Android Platform. An SDK contains lots of libraries and tools which you will use to develop your application.

A Library -> is a collection of pre-built compiled code which you can use to extend your application's features. For example, you may need to show some graphics in your application. Instead of creating this from scratch, you may choose to use a pre-built library someone else has developed which will give you the features you need thus saving you some time.

Thanks to Nithish for this explanations

Jorge Casariego
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SDK is software development kit which provides a platform/a way to develop software while library project is a project which have some lines of code to solve any desire problem, it may have design or code files. Generally library project focus only one problem but SDK is complete kit/tool to develop any task, if want some functionality in your code which is not present in SDK than we will go for any library project.

Haris Qureshi
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SDK is so that you can build applications for FaceBook. SDK can usually only be used in a more specific context. A library is so that you can take the library and use it on your own applications. A library is meant to be portable.

You can obviously use code from anywhere to anywhere, but I think thats the main difference.

Carlos Bribiescas
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