• October 30, 2020 5:24 pm
• by Deepthy

Nowadays, cross-platform mobile app development is growing in popularity. This is because cross-platform frameworks allow us to build native applications that give us access to every single Android and iOS APIs. Today, there are plenty of mobile app frameworks available to us. With a wide variety of mobile app frameworks being used today, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to choose a framework that suits these needs:

• The time needed to market the product
• Current development & maintenance costs
• Availability of mobile app developers
• Features of your product

Xamarin

Xamarin is a cross-platform and open-source mobile app development framework from Microsoft that allows us to build native iOS, Android, and Windows apps inside the Visual Studio. This mature cross-platform technology has been around for decades. Xamarin allows you to use the programming languages of the .NET framework such as C# and F# to build native UIs for iOS and Android devices. When it comes to building mobile apps with this framework, you can build it in two ways. You can use Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS or use Xamarin.Forms if you are developing simple apps and prototypes. Xamarin.Forms is simply a Visual Studio Library that allows us to rapidly prototype or build apps with few platform-specific functionalities. Whereas Xamarin.iOS compiles the source code into native ARM assembly code. The only downside with Xamarin is its smaller developer community. When compared to other frameworks such as React Native, the development community of Xamarin is significantly smaller. Thus, hiring mobile app developers who have expertise with Xamarin can be pretty much challenging.

Let’s explore some of the advantages of Xamarin:

• Xamarin enables you to share the C# backend for your mobile application, which includes all your business logic, View models, restful service calls, SQL databases, etc that are common across all platforms.
• Being a product of Microsoft, Xamarin allows you to use the full potential of Visual Studio to build native experiences and UI for all mobile platforms including wearables.

React Native

React Native is Facebook’s cross-platform mobile app development framework that allows you to build native mobile apps using the React library and JavaScript. React Native uses almost all the concepts that React.js uses including components, props, application states, lifecycles, etc. However, React Native won’t be a perfect fit if you are planning to build a highly complex mobile app that interacts more with hardware and Native APIs.

These are some of the advantages of React Native:

• React Native uses the same fundamental building blocks as a native app built with Swift/Objective-c/java, this makes them faster and gives your users an in-app experience similar to a real native mobile app.
• When compared to other cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, React Native delivers an improved developer experience and development velocity. This allows you to ship more features faster.
• As React Native uses React and JavaScript, other developers from your team who have experience building web apps using React.js can contribute to your mobile app development project.
• React Native also supports hot reloading that allows you to make changes to your JavaScript files and see the changes instantly without having the need for you to rebuild or recompile your application.
• Unlike other frameworks, React Native doesn’t render Html inside a web view. React Native uses real native components and real native APIs to interact with your code.

Flutter

Flutter is one of the popular mobile app development frameworks that are available today for building natively compiled hybrid mobile apps. Today, Flutter is used by millions of enterprises across the globe to build hybrid mobile applications.

• Flutter allows you to build your app in the same codebase so that you can share code between our iOS and Android apps.
• Apps that are built on Flutter can virtually run on any device such as smartphones, desktops, wearables, or even on TV.

Ionic

Ionic is one of the popular cross-platform mobile app development frameworks that is used to build user-friendly UIs and features. Ionic is built using Angular and Cordova and interacts directly with native SDK code.

• With ionic, you can run your native code inside other frameworks such as React Native, Angular, Vue.js, or even with vanilla JavaScript.
• Ionic has a rich library that consists of more than a hundred native device components and plugins that can directly access your device’s hardware.