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square/retrofit

A type-safe HTTP client for Android and the JVM

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What it does

Retrofit is a tool that makes it easier and more reliable for apps to communicate with web services and APIs (the interfaces that let apps send and receive data over the internet). Built by Square and widely adopted across the industry, it handles the complex plumbing of sending requests and receiving responses so that development teams can focus on building features instead.

Why it matters

With nearly 44,000 stars and over 7,000 forks on GitHub, Retrofit is one of the most trusted building blocks for Android apps, meaning a huge portion of mobile products your team ships or competes with likely depends on it. For PMs and founders, this signals that any Android product requiring real-time data, user accounts, or third-party integrations will almost certainly rely on a library like this — making it a core dependency worth understanding when scoping timelines and technical risk.

12Active

On the radar — signal detected

Stars
43.9k
Forks
7.4k
Contributors
208
Language
HTML
Category
Mobile

Score updated Apr 4, 2026

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