Mobile SDKs

Benched.ai Editorial Team

Mobile SDKs provide client libraries that wrap AI model APIs or on-device inference runtimes for iOS and Android apps.

Popular SDKs (2025)

SDK	Platform	On-device model?	Streaming
OpenAI Swift	iOS	No	Yes
Google Gemini Android	Android	Yes (Gemini Nano)	Yes
llama.cpp React Native	iOS/Android	Yes (GGUF)	No

Feature Matrix

Feature	Cloud-only	Hybrid	On-device
Latency	300–800 ms	100–400 ms	<50 ms
Privacy	Server logs	Partial	Local only
Model size	Any	<3 GB	<1 GB
Battery drain	Low	Medium	High

Design Trade-offs

On-device inference offers privacy & offline use but increases app size.
Hybrid SDKs auto-select cloud or local model based on token budget.
Continuous streaming drains battery faster.

Implementation Tips

Cache auth tokens securely in Keychain / Keystore.
Use exponential backoff for network retries.
Downsample microphone audio to 16 kHz before ASR calls.
Apple's Foundation Models and Speech frameworks provide on-device LLM and voice capabilities.¹²