By 2020, mobile apps are forecast to generate around 189 billion U.S. dollars in revenues via app stores and in-app advertising. They (mobile apps) are in all the verticals you can think of like E-commerce, TMT (technology, media & telecommunications), Fintech, IOT and VR/AR (virtual & augmented reality).

Now, in this scenario, there has to be the right path of developing the quality app in less time which serves the target audience and is reliable. Right?

With the increasing programming languages for Android and iOS operating systems, the selection of the right framework along with an apt platform and development strategy is paramount. Keeping your concerns in mind, we have chosen to address this topic for the upcoming boom of mobile applications.

Let’s have a look at some of the popular mobile app development frameworks that will become a major tool for the developers in 2019 and beyond.

Flutter

Do you need an app as MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for your startup to show it to your investors?

Flutter is highly recommended especially if you have little time.

Backed by Google & Community, Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework written in C, C++ and Dart. Also, it uses a 2D rendering graphics engine called Skia to create visual components and while these components look like native Material Design and Cupertino style widgets, they are not.

Well, these features might help if you are confused about your application-

• Fast development- Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. This is much like Android Studio’s Instant Run feature, but considerably faster.
• Reactive framework- That means, when it’s used correctly, one doesn’t have to worry about updating the contents of your user interface manually. It has sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.
• Expressive UIs- Delight users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design, widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.
  

Google Fuchsia's user interface and apps are written with Flutter. It seamlessly integrates with Android SDK, Firebase and Dart. Giants like Alibaba.com, Tencent and Hamilton have build apps with Flutter.

React Native

In 2015, Facebook released a mobile application framework, a native version of the JavaScript library called React Native. It has gained massive popularity and community support within the few years since it was introduced. The Github repository statistics reveal that 1002 contributors have committed 7,971 times in 45 branches with 124 releases. In addition, react native is also the 14th most starred repository on Github.

Main features of react native are native iOS components, asynchronous execution and touch handling. Similar to react for the Web, React Native applications are written using a mixture of JavaScript and XML-esque markup, known as JSX. (It’s an XML/HTML like syntax used by react that extends ECMAScript so that XML/HTML-like text can co-exist with react code.) Thus, your application will render using real mobile UI components and will have look n’ feel like any other mobile application.

It is used by companies like Instagram, CircleCI, Hike and GoSquared.

PhoneGap

Apache Cordova is a mobile application development framework originally created by Nitobi. It is written in C#, C++, Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C. Adobe Systems purchased Nitobi in 2011, rebranded it as PhoneGap, and later released an open source version of the software called Apache Cordova.

Apache Cordova enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript instead of relying on platform-specific APIs like those in Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. PhoneGap provides a bridge from the JavaScript world to the native world of the platform, which allows the JavaScript API to access and control the device (phone or tablet).

The businesses gain by using this framework as the app is prepared and ready to hit the market in minimalistic time. It can be easily integrated with TestFairy, Helpshift and Backand.

Xamarin

Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded 7 years ago. Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio).

The Xamarin platform consists of a number of elements that allows developing applications for iOS and Android- 

• C# language– Allows you to use a familiar syntax and advanced features like Generics, LINQ and the Parallel Task Library.
• Mono .NET framework– Provides a cross-platform implementation of the extensive features in Microsoft’s .NET framework.
• Compiler– Depending on the platform, produces a native app (eg. iOS) or an integrated .NET application and runtime (eg. Android). Apart from that, the compiler optimizes and links un-used code for mobile deployment.
  

Xamarin is used by over 700,000 developers from more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, with customers in 120 countries including Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, Dow Jones, Schindler, McKesson, Halliburton, Cognizant, GitHub, Rdio and WebMD, to accelerate the creation of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps.

Ionic

Ionic was created by Drifty Co. in 2013. The original version was released in the same year and built on top of AngularJS and Apache Cordova. The more recent releases, known as Ionic 3 or simply "Ionic", are built on Angular. Also, this framework has a huge and active community on the developer platforms.

It is a beautiful open source front-end framework for developing hybrid mobile apps in HTML5. There is no doubt that it is regarded as one of the best assets for the development of the Progressive Web Apps. The ionic framework has been created to bridge the gap between AngularJS web apps and hybrid mobile apps. It takes advantage of the rich AngularJS and Cordova library for developing highly interactive hybrid applications. Cordova plugins give access to different features of the operating system such as the battery, pro-location, camera, access to logs and more.

It integrates well with Ignite UI, Backand, AWS AppSync AND Atatus. Ionic’s customers include IBM, NASA, SAP and thousands more.

In the End

We know that every project or app has a different requirement and so the choice of the framework must be made carefully & after ascertaining the other essential factors. Considering the current number of GitHub repositories, React Native is on the top followed by Ionic and Cordova. Apart from these five, you might have come across other frameworks like JQuery Mobile, Intel XDK, Corona SDK and many more.
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We will be more than happy to provide you with feedback on your app ideas and Mobile development framework strategies.