Right Hybrid Mobile App Development framework for your needs

A mobile app development framework is a library that is designed to help developers in building mobile apps. It basically provides a fundamental structure that not only supports mobile application development, but it also boosts the process while reducing the costs at the same time.

If a developer with knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS wants to create a mobile app for both Android and iOS, they can now do so by simply using one of the many different frameworks available online. All you need is to code your app using the languages you are comfortable with and the framework will render a hybrid version of your app that works across multiple platforms.

Creating a web app has never been easier with these amazing frameworks. So, if you are ready to bring your dream app to life, then here are 5 amazing and popular frameworks that you can use:

1. Flutter
2. React Native
3. Onsen UI
4. Ionic
5. Xamarin
6. Nativescript
7. Framework7

Choosing the right mobile app development framework depends on a number of factors. That being said, let’s understand the best 7 mobile app frameworks individually that make the mobile app development simple.

Flutter

Flutter was launched by Google and is an open-source mobile application development SDK. It is a popular cross-platform app development and is written in the Dart language.However, when it comes to the choice of framework, it is best suited for the development of hybrid apps. It makes use of the 2D rendering engine called Skia to develop the visuals.

Flutter also offers many ready to use widgets (UI) to create a modern application. These widgets are optimized for mobile environment and designing the application using widgets is as simple as designing HTML.To be precise, Flutter application is itself a widget. Flutter widgets also support animations and gestures. The application logic is based on reactive programming. Widget may optionally have a state. By changing the state of the widget, Flutter will automatically compare the widget’s state and render the widget with only the necessary changes instead of re-rendering the whole widget.

Features

• Modern and reactive framework
• Uses Dart programming language and it is very easy to learn
• Fast development
• Beautiful and fluid user interfaces
• Huge widget catalog
• Runs same UI for multiple platforms
• High performance application

Advantages of Flutter

Flutter comes with attractive and customizable widgets for high performance and excellent mobile application. It fulfills all the custom requirements. Besides these, Flutter offers many more advantages as mentioned below −

• Dart has a large repository of software packages which lets you extend the capabilities of your application
• Developers need to write just a single code base for both applications (both Android and iOS platforms)
• Flutter needs lesser testing. Because of its single code base, it is sufficient if we write automated tests once for both the platforms
• Flutter’s simplicity makes it a good candidate for fast development. Its customization capability and extendibility makes it even more powerful
• With Flutter, developers have full control over the widgets and its layout
• Flutter offers great developer tools, with amazing hot reload

React Native

From the past few years, React Native has caused a huge impression in the mobile app development industry. React Native is a full-blown JS framework that mobile app developers to create cross-platform software that is somehow similar to other native applications. The main thing about this programming language is that it uses native components for front-end and does not involve the participation of any browser, thus affecting the presentation of the application in an upbeat manner.

React Native framework is managed by an expert team of developers, who from time to time help beginner developers to speed up their development process. There are several benefits of learning this language as any issues with React Native can be solved promptly, when discussed with other expert developers of the community. Nowadays more and more prefer to choose React Native framework while developing a mobile application and hence you can share the code across diverse platforms. However, the framework uses native components, which means offering a much livelier experience along with better performance.

Start learning React native
The first step towards learning React native is to install it. It may sound quite simple but trust me it is a lengthy process
You can start working on this framework by reading the getting started tutorial and try to run it on your machine.
Once you are able to work through some tutorials, the next step is to start building personal projects. Build some simple applications that will allow you to enjoy the development experience and provide opportunities for you to figure out what you don’t understand yet. By understanding your knowledge gaps, you are able to look up the solutions and more quickly get to the point where you can use React Native professionally.

Another reason why the REACT Native framework has gained popularity in recent years is that the framework helps cater both the platforms at one go and ends the holy war of selecting either iOS or Android development for mobile developers. Hence, giant companies like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Airbnb, Tesla, Walmart, Baidu Mobile, Bloomberg, UberEATS Vogue and many more have shifted their eyeballs towards it.

Onsen UI

Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca tools. Onsen UI is one of those JavaScript Frameworks, an open-source UI framework and Components, based on PhoneGap and Cordova. It allows you to create HTML5 hybrid and Mobile apps using Web Technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When version 2 came out, Onsen UI became a JavaScript framework-agnostic! What is that mean? It means that developers can now create mobile apps with or without JavaScript Frameworks.

Although Onsen UI is a powerful tool to build complex mobile apps, however, it’s easy to learn and work with. A lot of resources concluded in the official documentation, large community forums to get answered for your question, interactive tutorials that make the learning process fun and effective. This is why Onsen UI simple and easy to use. People are worried about the slower performance of some PhoneGap/Cordova apps when it comes to lower ends devices, but that won’t be the problem anymore. The Onsen UI team has just got that covered! All the animations included in Onsen UI have been optimized and tuned to perform well on a wide range of devices. Onsen UI team are also taking the matter of slow performance seriously, they ensure that all the applications created using Onsen UI are up and running smoothly even on lower devices. Get inspired by wonderful apps created with Onsen UI that have already been published in Google Play and App store. Onsen UI apps have shipped on over 100 million mobile devices.

Ionic

Ionic Framework is an open-source UI toolkit for building performant, high-quality mobile and desktop apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). Ionic Framework is focused on the frontend user experience, or UI interaction of an app (controls, interactions, gestures, animations). It’s easy to learn and integrates nicely with other libraries or frameworks, such as Angular, or can be used standalone without a frontend framework using a simple script include.

Currently, Ionic Framework has official integrations with Angular and React, and support for Vue is in development. If you’d like to learn more about Ionic Framework before diving in, we created a video to walk you through the basics. Ionic uses Cordova and, more recently, Capacitor plugins to gain access to host operating systems features such as Camera, GPS, Flashlight, etc. Users can build their apps, and they can then be customized for Android, iOS, Windows, Desktop (with Electron), or modern browsers. Ionic allows app building and deployment by wrapping around the build tool Cordova or Capacitor with a simplified ‘ionic’ command-line tool.

Using Web Components, Ionic provides custom components and methods for interacting with them. One such component, virtual scroll, allows users to scroll through a list of thousands of items without any performance hits. Another component, tabs, creates a tabbed interface with support for native-style navigation and history state management.
While past releases of Ionic were tightly coupled to Angular, V4 of the framework was re-engineered to work as a standalone Web Component library, with integrations for the latest JavaScript frameworks, like Angular. Ionic can be used in most frontend frameworks with success, including React and Vue, though some frameworks need a shim for full Web Component support.
Ionic is Built on Angular. If you already know AngularJS then you will have a super easy time learning Ionic. If you don’t already know AngularJS then you will learn it through using Ionic, and will then be able to use it to build web apps as well as mobile apps.

Xamarin

Microsoft bought Xamarin from its founder in 2016 and they made it open-source ever since. Xamarin is basically a cross-platform app development framework based on C# programming language that takes a slightly different approach than the rest of the mobile app frameworks.

Advantages of Xamarin:
• Native UI
• Easy API Integration
• Shared Code Base
• Huge Community
• Less complex development environment

Businesses worldwide, spanning all industries, use Xamarin and .NET to build performant native mobile apps. Xamarin apps are native apps! Whether you’re designing a uniform UI across platforms or building a native user interface, your apps will behave the way users expect.

With the ability to access the full spectrum of functionality exposed by the underlying platform and device, as well as leveraging platform-specific hardware acceleration, and Xamarin apps are compiled for native performance.
Xamarin has an active community that is answering questions, producing samples, writing tutorials, authoring books, and more. The Xamarin Universal Library project provides a great community-maintained list of Xamarin resources, and Planet Xamarin is a central location for community bloggers. If you know c#, it’s probably worth just jumping to swift (ios) or java (android). It’ll make you a better programmer and you’ll create better apps. Any tool is worth learning if you want to use it.

Nativescript

NativeScript is a cross-platform JavaScript framework that lets you develop native iOS and Android apps from a single code base. The framework provides JavaScript access to the native APIs, user interface, and rendering engines of iOS and Android. By using JavaScript or TypeScript, you can create one project that builds into an iOS or Android app with completely native user experience.
The NativeScript technology can be presented as built upon several major parts — Runtimes, Core Modules, CLI, Plugins. Each combine to allow you direct access to all native platform APIs directly from JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, or Vue.js.

Additionally, NativeScript ships with a rich set of cross-platform abstractions to help you rapidly build quality iOS and Android applications from the same code base. NativeScript performance is on par or better than other cross-platform solutions, like Xamarin. NativeScript animations run at 60 frames per second and we have the ability to offload long-running processes to maintain front end speed. Performance optimizations are a component of each release.

NativeScript has three key advantages over React Native:
• It’s designed to be written once, run anywhere. React Native still requires platform-specific code. (Though I heard in a podcast last week that React Native is trying to move toward write once run everywhere)
• Angular 2 is easier to use than React. Angular is Easy. React is Hard. I feel Angular 2 (which has first-class support in NativeScript) is even easier than Angular 1
• You can write directly to native APIs from JavaScript in NativeScript (so you don’t need to write a native plug in to access a native API)

The latter is also an advantage NativeScript has over Ionic, in addition to the speed advantages.

Framework7

Framework7 is a free and Open-source HTML framework for developing hybrid mobile apps or web apps for iOS and Android devices. It is one of a set of open-source libraries and solutions from iDangero.us authored by Vladimir Kharlampidi.

Framework7 can also be used with other frameworks like Angular, React, etc. if desired.

Features of Framework7

• Open-source and free to use
• Very easy to use and similar syntax to jQuery
• Extremely fast. It has a built-in FastClick library
• Responsive. It has a built-in grid system layout to arrange elements responsively
• Fully Dynamic. It loads pages from templates via flexible router API
• Use the native view
• Page animation
• High-performance animation
• Clear JS API
• Built-in Helper libraries

Advantages

• Framework7 contains many pre-styled widgets/components
• It has built-in helper libraries
• Framework7 is not dependent on any third party library even for DOM manipulation. Instead, it has its own custom DOM7
• You can easily use Framework7 with Angular and React frameworks
• Framework7 facilitates you to create apps once you know HTML, CSS, and some basic JavaScript
• It supports faster development via Bower

The reason Framework7 is last in the list is because of the online community support which is less compared to other frameworks on the list.

Conclusion
Knowing the right framework to choose depends on a number of things. If you intend to develop a game or an app requiring a lot of device-specific functions, going native is probably the best for you. But if your mobile app is going to be a relatively simple one, going cross-platform is the better option as it saves you time and money.