In the recent years there is a huge rise in the number of smartphone users, with figures reaching billions. Due to this a lot of enterprises now want to develop mobile applications for their customers along with their existing websites. It is very important now as most of the people are using their smartphones to carry out various tasks.

Are you planning to hire a mobile app development company for your project? Are you not too tech savvy? There are chances that you don’t know facts about the trending mobile app frameworks. Don’t worry! We have got your back!

Here we will discuss in detail all about the different types of mobile application frameworks existing in the market. Let’s get started!

Types of Mobile App Development Frameworks

Just like there are a variety of frameworks to develop web apps. We have got quite a range of mobile app development frameworks. These frameworks fall under three broad categories

Native Mobile App Development Frameworks

Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks

Cross Platform Mobile App Development Frameworks

We will now explain these categories of frameworks to help you make an informed decision for your project.

Native Mobile App Development

Native apps are the first preference of Google and Apple to develop apps. Native mobile app development means developing mobile applications on independent platforms with two different code base i.e Android and iOS.

Native mobile apps give fast performance and higher degree of reliability. These platform specific frameworks have rich benefits in handling and interacting with mobile components such as camera, phone, SMS etc. Moreover, users can use some of the applications without an internet connection due to the inbuilt database provided by the framework.

Android and iOS operating systems will always be rivals until there is a large audience base for both of them. However, Android development and iOS development can turn to be expensive as you will have to hire a team of mobile app developers individually for them.

Native development still remains popular as the applications can always be optimized according to the latest OS version and provide better user experience and performance to your customers.

Hybrid Mobile App Development

Hybrid apps will appear similar to any other mobile apps. It makes use of web application technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript for development. The major advantage in the case of hybrid development is using a single code base to deploy in two different platforms.

The hybrid mobile apps work within a web view container and makes it look like a real mobile application. Since these applications are running in a web view container of the mobile operating system, it cannot directly interact with the native API and controllers like interaction with camera, SMS, phone directory etc.

To interact with the native controllers there are interaction frameworks such as Adobe PhoneGap, Cordova etc that act as an intermediary to make everything work like a mobile application with fewer restrictions.

Hybrid applications can’t provide rich UI performance and user experience as it is just a layer to interact with the mobile using web view. Ionic framework is the most popular hybrid framework.

Ionic Framework

Ionic framework is an open source SDK for hybrid app development. It is built on top of Angular.js and Apache Cordova and provides tools and services to develop hybrid applications using web technologies such as CSS, HTML 5 and Sass.

Ionic is licensed under MIT and supported by a massive community worldwide. You can use its CLI to build, test and deploy your Ionic apps on any platform. This open source framework has Ionicons icon pack with hundreds of the most common app icons making the ionic development process faster.

Mobile Angular UI

It is a hybrid mobile framework for people who are fans of working with Bootstrap and Angular. Mobile Angular UI gives you the best of both - Bootstrap 3 and Angular framework to develop HTML 5 mobile applications. It is more like an extension to Bootstrap 3 but without any dependencies of Bootstrap js libs or jQuery.

All you have to do is use some of the AngularJs directives to craft awesome mobile user experiences. To provide a smooth and better user experience, Mobile Angular UI comes with fastclick.js and overthrow.js.

Cross Platform Mobile App Development

Like hybrid development, cross platform development includes a single code base which compiles with the native code base to work along with it rather than working in a web engine like hybrid. As it compiles in the native code itself, no intermediate layers are required.

However, cross platform frameworks still lack in performance when compared with native mobile application frameworks. Some of the most popular cross platform frameworks include React Native, Native Script, Xamarin and Flutter.

React Native

React Native was introduced by Facebook in the year 2015. It is an open source framework which allows you to develop a mobile app with JavaScript. By making use of the native layout components, React Native development enables you to create engaging UIs that can’t be distinguished from a native app.

Pros

Better than hybrid in terms of performance & experience

Time Efficiency

Shorter Team Size

Large Community

Cons

Small collection of ready made components

You need knowledge of native development too

Lacks in comparison to native app

Flutter

Flutter was initially released by Google in the year 2017 and a stable release in 2018. It is Google’s UI framework to create high quality native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time. Google will always give priority to native development in the case of Android platform, but when it comes to cross platform, Google recommends Flutter development.

Pros

Better than hybrid in terms of performance & experience

Same app UI on older devices

Android studio supports Flutter for app development

Cons

Libraries & Support are still not rich as native development

You need knowledge of native development too

Lesser community size

Conclusion

Now, that we have given you the in depth analysis of different mobile app frameworks we can rightly say that native app development remains unbeatable in terms of performance and rich UI.

However, we would still like to clarify that ultimate choice of the framework still depends on the scope and cost of the project. If cost is one of the major factors impacting your project then you can go for hybrid or cross platform development.