Developers always look for efficient ways to implement the idea of a mobile application. Every business/ start-ups want to reach more people in a limited time and limited resources. This enhances developers’ interest to choose the right technology stack that considers various aspects related to mobile app development that accounts for success.
So, when we are discussing mobile applications, then iOS and Android become the top and leading mobile platforms. And when we are talking about the framework, it comes down to native apps vs. hybrid apps. Around 2.47 million apps in the Google play store and 1.8 million apps in the Apple app store shows a strong race in the market. Thus, for developers, choosing the right platform is a necessity.
Here, I am going to discuss the hybrid app frameworks but, before that, I am describing both Native and Hybrid app frameworks. It will deliver an idea about Hybrid frameworks and will show its importance in mobile app development.
Native vs. Hybrid
A native mobile app is an application created for use in a single particular platform or device, like Android, iOS, BlackBerry, or Windows. The process of native development is simple, but it might not be understandable to all. The code needs to be re-written every time for each platform. In short, the logic remains the same, but the language, APIs, and the development process might be different as per requirement. Therefore, this process becomes quite long for complex applications.
A Hybrid app is the combination of native and web app developments, thus it is named as a hybrid. A hybrid app is created as a single app for use on multiple platforms like Android, iPhone, and Windows. The hybrid application has to use specially designed APIs to reach fundamental features. These apps are developed using web technologies, including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Hybrid based applications are easy to build than Native but aren’t faster than Native apps. But, it is popular because of cost-effectiveness and a single code base with which you can develop a single app for multiple platforms.
Hybrid Mobile App Frameworks
Here, I am discussing the top 5 Hybrid mobile app frameworks that will definitely the top-rated frameworks in 2021.
Ionic
In Hybrid app development, Ionic is the most popular cross-platform app framework based on AngularJS. It facilitates developers to use many languages jointly i.e., HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and Cordova wrapper to access native platform controllers. With Ionic, building a Progressive Web Apps is quite easy. It allows developers to create an application with great graphical representation and innovative themes that makes it user-friendly. Thus, Apps developed with this framework are highly interactive.
Key Points
- It allows developers to perform perfectly on various platforms.
- It allows modifications in the code structure that saves a lot of developer’s time.
- It is based on a SAAS UI framework designed specifically for mobile operating systems.
- It uses Cordova plugins that allow in-built features of devices such as, camera, GPS, and Audio Recorder.
React Native
React Native is another popular framework. This framework is built on JavaScript and is used to write real code. It gives the native-like feel to mobile applications for both Android and iOS. It combines the benefits of JavaScript and React.JS as well as facilitates developers to write modules in Objective-C, Swift, or Java languages.
Key Points
- It gives developers a facility to work on heavy operations such as image editing, video processing, or operations, which are not part of the framework APIs.
- It has a large community to support.
- Its one-time coding feature instantly reduces the app development time and keeping the React Native app development cost to its lowest.
- It is compatible with third-party plugins, such as Google Maps.
Flutter
It is a popular framework and Google’s high-powered open-source platform. It enables developers to create apps with high-productive, uniformity, and dynamicity value as it has a single codebase for Android and iOS. Also, it creates highly inventive UIs with flexible designs.
Key Points
- It promotes portable GPU, which renders UI power, allowing it to work on the latest interfaces.
- It does not require updating the UI contents manually.
- It is a perfect choice for developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Xamarin
It is a different and intelligent framework from other discussed Native app frameworks. This is a streamlined framework used for developing apps for Android, Windows, and iOS, with the help of C# and .Net, instead of JS libraries and HTML.
Key Points
- Apps developed on the Xamarin framework are built using C#.
- With the help of specific Plugins and APIs, it reduces hardware compatibility problems to a great extent.
- It allows developers to reuse many third-party codebases encrypted in Java, Objective-C or C++,
- It reduces the time and cost of mobile app development. For it, it supports the WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) and collection of class libraries.
- It offers robust compile-time checking and has an amazing native user interface.
NativeScript
NativeScript is a free cross-platform framework based on JavaScript. It is the desirable choice for those developers who are looking for WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) functionality. It offers all native APIs and has an ability to the developers to reuse existing plugins, straight from NPM into the projects.
Key Points
- With NativeScript, developers only required to define once and let the NativeScript adapt to run everywhere.
- It provides developers, a complete web solution that contains all plugins.
- With NativeScript, developers don’t require any specific knowledge of native development languages because it gives freedom to developers to easily access native Android and iOS APIs.
- It uses Angular and TypeScript for programming purposes.
Wrapping Up
The basic idea behind selecting the framework is to grasp assurance to the smooth functioning of an app and add the capability to the app to run efficiently on all platforms as a native app. The best part of all Native framework is that it facilitates cost-effectiveness and support WORD. This feature help developers to develop an effective application. But the question is which out of the mentioned Hybrid app frameworks should you choose? The answer is: it depends. It depends upon what you want to achieve.