• October 29, 2020 3:10 pm
• by Manek

As a business owner, it’s vital for you to adopt mobile app frameworks that can make your customers happier and do their job consistently. In the last couple of years, we have witnessed significant shifts in the realm of mobile app development as cross-platform mobile app development frameworks began to gain popularity among app developers. If you are on the lookout for building a mobile app for your business or hire mobile app developer, you must be probably aware of this technology. But what exactly is a hybrid app? A hybrid app is just a web app that is packaged into a native app. Hybrid apps combine the best of both worlds, blending the flexibility and convenience of the web with the performance and hardware capabilities of native development. So, Let’s have a look at some of the trending cross-platform mobile app development frameworks that are available today. Let’s dig in!

1. React Native

React Native is a popular Framework for building native mobile apps for Android and iOS. This framework was created by Facebook back in 2015 and over the past few years, it has gained a lot of popularity among a lot of mobile app developers around the world. Let’s see why this framework is popular among developers.

Why React Native?

• Shallow Learning Curve: Learning React Native can be pretty much easier for you if you have good knowledge of the React.js library. React Native code is pretty much similar to that of the React code you write for the web.
• Cross-Platform: Another advantage of React Native is that you can build a native mobile app for both iOS and Android without the need of learning programming languages such as Java, Swift, Objective-C, and Kotlin. Nowadays more companies prefer to hire mobile app developers who are skilled in cross-platform mobile app development frameworks such as React Native. This is because they don’t need to hire two separate teams of developers to maintain two different platforms. If they decide to go with Native mobile app development they need to hire two developers for Android and iOS.
• Hot Reload: Like Flutter, React Native development has an amazing feature called hot Reload. With this feature, when you do any changes you will see the result on your phone or in a simulator in real-time. However, in native mobile app development, every time you make changes to your code you need the help of a compiler to compile the code before you can see the actual changes that you made on your app. Depending upon the size of your app it can take anywhere from a fraction of a second to a minute to display the changes on the simulator.
• Large Community Support: When we talk about the popularity of this framework, React Native has got a larger developer community when compared to other mobile app development frameworks such as Flutter, Vue Native, etc, which are newcomers in the arena of mobile app development.
• More Stability: When compared with other mobile app development frameworks, React Native is much more stable, mature, more adoption rates, and high developer productivity.

2. Flutter

Flutter is a mobile UI framework for building native apps for iOS and Android. This framework gives us the advantage of using a single codebase across all operating systems. Flutter uses material design out of the box, which gives your apps a great UI.

Why Flutter?

• Easy to Learn: Flutter uses Dart as its programming language which was developed by Google. It is used internally at Google to build powerful apps such as Google AdWords, Google fiber, etc. Learning Dart is super easy as you only need to know any programming language. Dart is a powerful language that is quite easy to work with. Dart is pretty much similar to that of modern object oriented programming languages and is packed with plenty of preset features that other powerful languages lack. Once you learn and understand its logic, you can use it to build mobile apps that can work with both iOS and Android platforms.
• Cross-Platform: Since Flutter has only a single codebase, this makes maintenance and updates a lot easier. You can simply deploy the updates that you’ve made into the source code and they will be applied to both Android and iOS apps.
• Interactive UI Design: The user interface plays an important role to attract customers. With Flutter, you can build high-end UI for your mobile application without any hassles. Flutter allows you to use a very simple and flexible layout system to build beautiful user interfaces for your mobile app. Like React Native, Flutter also supports hot reloading and this feature makes UI development in Flutter quite an easy process. Hot reloading maintains the state of the app while simultaneously updating code. This feature makes your mobile app development a lot easier and significantly faster especially when you work with a native emulator. In Flutter, soon after you update your code and hit save, the UI will change in realtime and this makes it really fun and easy to design beautiful user interfaces.

3. Ionic

Ionic is a popular cross-platform framework built on web technologies such as html5, CSS and JavaScript that allow you to build apps that target iOS, Android, PWA or even desktop.

Why Ionic?

• Better Performance: Ionic also has a rich library that consists of more than a hundred native device plugins and components for accessing the device’s hardware. You can use any component to increase your mobile app- performance. This makes it easier for you to build cross-platform apps that can directly access native device features such as Geolocation, Camera, Bluetooth, and other hardware capabilities.
• Cross-Platform: Ionic allows 100% code reuse and with it, you can maintain and update your mobile app in one single codebase. This helps you to get a unified look and feel across both iOS and Android. This framework also allows you to deploy your app as a PWA or a native desktop app with a single shared codebase.
• Easy Integration with other frontend frameworks: the biggest advantage of ionic is that you can run your native code inside other frameworks such as React Native, Angular, Vue.js, or even no framework at all using plain old JavaScript.

4. Xamarin

Xamarin is a cross-platform native solution 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 and you can use the programming languages of the .NET framework such as C# and F# to build native UI for mobile devices and desktop.

Why Xamarin?

• Less maintenance: Maintaining and updating other mobile app development frameworks requires more work. However, this is not the case with Xamarin. Unlike other frameworks, you don’t have to update the source code of your apps individually in Xamarin. Xamarin allows you to apply changes that you’ve made in the source file directly to your apps.
• Cross-Platform: Xamarin is a cross-platform framework that allows you to build mobile apps by sharing a single source code, this allows developers to complete their mobile app development process faster.
• Faster prototyping: With this framework, you can access hybrid UI toolkits to seamlessly build beautiful user interfaces that work on both iOS and Android.