Mobile applications are very important for almost any business to survive because they help your business grow in a lot of ways. Apps will make your audience very close to your business and your services, and of course, the more you are close to your clients the more profit you will make.
Over 6.3 billion people across the world are using a smartphone in 2022, which makes the mobile app development among the most popular and in-demand industries.
Therefore, in this blog post we will take a look at the top 5 cross-platform mobile app development frameworks in 2022. We will explain in detail the best frameworks that you should to build your next mobile application and why you should use them?
Cross-platform mobile app development frameworks are really in-demand, especially in the last few years. their job is to help developers build great mobile applications in a short amount of time and with the highest quality possible. Using this kind of framework will save you time and money which are the most important factors for the success of your business.
Types of mobile development tools
Actually, there are two main types of mobile app development tools that we can use to build high-quality applications. The first one is a native mobile app development and the second is cross-platform mobile app development. They both have the same objective which is building high-quality mobile applications, but they also have some differences.
Let’s define each one of them separately in order to understand the difference between them.
Native mobile app development
Native mobile app development means simply the development of a mobile application exclusively for a single platform such as Android, IOS, or windows. The tools and programming languages used in native mobile app development are specific for a single platform, which is a very powerful advantage.
You can for instance use Java and Kotlin to build native android mobile applications or Swift and Objective-c to build native IOS mobile applications.
The best and the most interesting thing about native mobile applications is the exceptional user experience they deliver because they are very performant and specific for a single platform.
Using native mobile app development technologies helps you as a programmer to achieve an unlimited number of functionalities using all the APIs that the platform provide that you’re working on.
The problem that every company faces when it comes to developing a native mobile application is the cost. Native mobile apps will absolutely cost you a lot of money especially if you need both versions Android and IOS. You will need to hire two teams working on different platforms which will cost a lot.
Cross-platform mobile app development
Cross-platform mobile application development refers to the process of the development of a mobile application for multiple platforms (Android, IOS, Windows, Web) while writing a single code base. This way of developing mobile applications will save you time and money. Therefore startups prefer cross-platform mobile apps over native ones.
The biggest advantage of cross-platform mobile app development is saving time and money because you will only hire a single team to develop your mobile app that you can deploy in almost all the platforms (Android, IOS, Web, Desktop…).
The cross-platform application can be a little bit slower compared to a native application which is actually normal because you build a single code base for many platforms.
Native and cross-platform mobile app development are two different ways to build high quality mobile applications. You can take one of them based on your project’s needs. However, if you want to know more about the difference between both of them and which one is the best for you check out this article.
What are the top 5 cross platform mobile development frameworks in 2022
Cross-platform mobile development as we described earlier in this post means the development of mobile application for multiple platforms while writing a single code base which seems very interesting because it saves a lot of time and money.
This leads us to a very important question which is what are the best cross-platform mobile development technologies ? and how to use them? Here is the list of the best cross-platform mobile application development frameworks in 2022.
Ionic
Website: https://ionicframework.com/
Ionic is one of the most used and the most popular cross-platform development frameworks which is used to build performant and highly interactive web and mobile applications. It uses capacitor and Cordova to build Android and IOS mobile apps.
This powerful framework is actually an open-source mobile toolkit that provides high quality built-in UI components to develop professional mobile applications. It uses web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to build great mobile apps with a fantastic user experience.
Mobile and web developers love Ionic because it gives the possibility to use web technologies. Additionally, it provides some amazing built-in UI components.
According to the official website of ionic, 16% of mobile apps in Play Store are using Ionic as their main framework, and 10% of IOS mobile applications in Apple store are mainly using the Ionic framework. This is statistics are very enough to categorize Ionic as one of the most powerful technologies in the mobile industry.
If you are interested to learn more about Ionic. This article will explain step by step How to read data from an API using Ionic 6.
React Native
Website: https://reactnative.dev/
React Native is a very powerful cross-platform mobile application development framework built by Facebook in 2015. It is actually based on React JS framework which is a powerful JavaScript framework for web app development.
This open-source framework enables JavaScript developers build high quality Android and IOS applications which is amazing especially for startups and companies just starting their businesses. They won’t need to hire web and mobile developer. They may need only one JavaScript developer who will develop web and mobile apps.
The open source framework has also a big amount of mobile applications in the market which makes it among the best cross-platform mobile apps to use in 2022. Over 14.5% of the top 500 apps in the US are built using React Native.
Flutter
Website: https://flutter.dev/
As we all know, Google is one of the best companies in the planet that changed the history of the internet, they provide the best products and services in the world. Flutter is one of Google’s products that was built in 2015. This amazing framework helps developers build web, mobile and desktop applications with a single code base.
Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework that provides very powerful animations API, Widget system support, highly flexible user interface and very powerful user experience.
What makes flutter very powerful is actually the array of widgets it provides which is highly customizable and look and feel very unique.
Examples of some mobile applications that was developed using Flutter:
- Google Ads
- KlasterMe
- Reflectly
- Hamilton
In March 2021, there were over 150,000 mobile applications using flutter in Play store and over 400,000 mobile apps in Apple store which is really amazing especially if look at the date of creation of flutter which is 2015.
Xamarin
Website: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin
Xamarin is a great cross-platform mobile app development that was developed by Microsoft back in 2013 and it is absolutely open-source. This technology comes with a lot of cool features and tools that helps build high quality Android and IOS mobile applications.
This technology is a .Net based framework that save developers and companies a tons of money and time which will generate multiple mobile apps for multiple platforms. C# is a very powerful language and it is the programming language used in Xamarin framework.
Examples of some mobile applications that was developed using Xamarin:
- Just Giving: Online Fundraising Platform
- Storyo: Storytelling Video Maker App
- The World Bank: Survey Conducting App
- FreshDirect: Online Food & Grocery
And the list of mobile apps developed in Xamarin is very long.
Apache Cordova
Website: https://cordova.apache.org/
Apache Cordova is quite similar to Ionic du to the use of web development technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It is actually a very powerful friendly cross-platform mobile app development framework.
The best part about Apache Cordova is that it gives the ability to access some particular hardware components in the mobile such as Camera, Microphone, Ram… It has also the ability to generate an application for multiple platforms based on a single code base which is really amazing.
This technology has a great community of developers that can help you if you face any kind of problem while developing mobile applications using Apache Cordova.
Conclusion
In this article we tried to list down the top 5 cross-platform mobile application development frameworks based on the market statistics and experts’ choices. These technologies are currently and will continue to be the best mobile app development frameworks.
From a single code base, you can generate mobile applications for multiple different platforms, this is really powerful and unique. That is why cross-platform mobile app development technologies had a very big increase in the use especially in the last few years.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post and you got what you are looking for. Thank you for reading.
