Mobile development is made so much easier when you have an SDK to work from. Facebook’s mobile SDKs for iOS and Android are some of the best in the biz, and now the social network is making parts of it open source.

Facebook announced today that Bolts – a “collection of low-level libraries designed to make developing mobile apps easier” – is now available to all through an open source license. It doesn’t require Parse or Facebook developer services or accounts. It just requires you to download the jar and start using it.

Where did Bolts come from? Facebook says it all came about from a collaboration between the iOS and Android SDK teams:

When Parse joined Facebook, we immediately started looking for ways to improve our SDKs by comparing code and learning from each others’ successes. We found that there were a lot of small, low-level utility classes in iOS and Android that we had both implemented. Rather than continue to have two version of these components, we decided to collaborate on one common library between our SDKs. Today, we are open-sourcing that library to make it available to others.

In the blog post, Facebook details a feature of Bolts called “tasks” which “make organization of complex asynchronous code more manageable.” You’ll want to check out the post in full to see how you can implements Bolts “tasks” in your iOS or Android app.

If you want to give Bolts a try, you can download the jar file here and the framework file here. If you prefer to peek under the hood, you can find that on github as well. While you’re there, you’ll want to check out the documentation.

Image via GitHub