Top 7 mobile app development frameworks in 2020
Let’s dive in each app development framework one by one.
1. React Native
React Native is one of the most popular framework for mobile app development. Initially built by facebook, It is used for the development of both platforms Android and iOS.
Many high performance mobile apps have been built in a short period through this framework. The app example can be seen in startups and fortune 500 companies.
This framework reduces the time it takes to build a mobile app that is both powerful and reliable.
React Native does this because it’s a cross-platform mobile app development framework that uses the same code base for both Android and iOS applications.
Key Features
– Easy Maintainability
– Reusable components
– Cross-Platform framework
– JavaScript
2. Flutter
The framework launched by Google is more of a software development kit than a mobile app development framework. Flutter is popular for building fast beautiful, natively compiled apps for both mobile & web applications.
Flutter is also a cross platform app development framework that uses a single code base for both iOS and Android app development. It is based on an object-oriented programming language- Dart.
Apart from being a cross platform framework, Flutter also allows developers to modify old widgets & create new widgets effortlessly.
Key Features
– Fast Development
– Flexible UI
– Cross-Platform Framework
– Native Performance
3. Ionic
Ionic is again a widely used open source app development framework built with Angular and cordova. It also supports cross platform development and you can develop apps for three different platforms here — Android, iOS and Windows.
Ionic uses minimal DOM to enhance performance and bring better efficiency while providing the native APIs like Ionic Native and Cordova.
The best part of using Ionic Framework for mobile app development is its UI elements. It provides a set of default UI elements such as action sheets, tab bars, filters, forms, and navigation menu, which helps developers focus on the development part rather than on UI elements.
Key Features
– Easy to Adopt
– Cross-Platform Framework
– Platform Independent
– Built on Angular
– In built CLI (Command line interface)
4. Xamarin
Acquired by Microsoft, Xamarin is also an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework, which also uses the same code base for iOS and Android applications.
Xamarin provides an excellent user interface and comes with almost all important tools that are required for a mobile app.
The important thing about Xamarin is that it uses C# programming language, which means there is no need to learn Swift or Java to build an iPhone or Android app.
Key Features:
– Native API Access
– Easy API Integration
– Native UI Support
– Huge Community (1.4 million developers)
– Targets Every Platform
5. PhoneGap
PhoneGap was initially built by Nitobi in 2011 and launched as Apache Cordova Adobe. However, after the acquisition by Adobe its name changed to Adobe PhoneGap.
It is a cross-platform mobile app development framework and is considered as a reliable platform for developers to develop apps in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS.
It provides best-in-class performance, and enables mobile app developers to build apps without facing any hardware restrictions also supports inbuilt hardware features such as Camera, GPS, Storage, Accelerometer, etc.
Key Features:
– Robust Support
– No Hardware Restrictions
– High Compatibility
– Inbuilt hardware features
6. Corona
Launched in 2009, Corona is an open-source cross-platform framework ideal for rapidly creating apps and games for mobile devices, desktop, tablets & smart TV, – writes medium.
It is a Lua based framework, which is a popular light-weight scripting language that offers speed, ease of usage and flexibility to develop apps.
Developers are using this free, open-source, and powerful framework to build apps to most of the platforms including Android, iOS, macOS, Tablets, Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire.
Many popular games like Angry Birds and Warcraft have utilized the robust Corona framework.
Key Features:
– Predominant APIs
– Plugins Availability
– Lua Programming
– Native Library Support
7. Mobile Angular UI
Mobile Angular is also a free open-source mobile UI framework that helps in building mobile apps with a combination of bootstrap and Angular framework.
Under MIT License, this framework simplifies the mobile app development process. It provides numerous UI components like switches, scrollable areas, overlays, navbars to build a seamless intuitive and attractive user interface for mobile apps.
Key Features:
– Interactive components
– LightWeight
-JavaScript