Smartphones have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Everything from hailing an Uber ride or ordering through Amazon is the new norm. To remain relevant in an increasingly digital world, most businesses have started focusing on their online and mobile exposure.
As consumers move away from traditional desktop websites and switching to apps on their handheld devices, the need of the hour is to evolve or risk fading into obscurity. However, it is not as easy a task to make an app since there are multiple factors at play here. You have to decide how many functionalities you want to bake into your app, if you want to support it on both Android and iOS and of course how much resources you want to pour into the project itself.
Well, today we will to make this decision a tad easier for you by introducing you to the top 3 app development frameworks currently available to developers. Once you gain the intricate knowledge of the pros and cons of each of these frameworks, you can then easily narrow down the shortlist to the best mobile app development company to create your unique app, built on your specified framework.
1. Native
Native has been widely used for app development and there are definite positives to it. Most of it stems from the fact that there is extensive support for it both on Android as well and iOS and it does allow developers to write a lot of low-level code which is great for apps that need to work with a low overhead when it comes to system resources.
However, Native is not cross-platform being a small business, it can become really complicated and resource intensive to have two development teams that have no overlap and are working on two entirely different codebases.
2. React Native
Built by Facebook, React Native solves some the most glaring flaws of natives but as with any other framework, there are pros and cons of react native as well. One of the biggest assets of React Native is that it is cross compatible meaning the initial investment is small and the same developer team, as well as codebase, can be reused for developing on different platforms like Android and iOS.
One other added advantage here is that React Native allows the app component to be fully rendered with native assets which means an Android app can follow the Material theme and not look like a quickly cobbled together iOS clone. However, the framework is still new and thus can come with its own pitfalls ie. lack of pre-built libraries.
3. Ionic
Now while this one might be the last in this list, it still has a lot of aces up its sleeve that makes it a pretty well-rounded choice for a framework. One of the best things about Ionic is that it is based on the HTML5 standard which means it can be used to create Hybrid Apps. In fact, if you need an app as well as a mobile website that look and function mostly the same Ionic can be one of the best choices.
When it comes to cross compatibility in developing a Progressive Web Apps, Ionic holds an edge over the other two that we have mentioned in this list.
At the end of the day, all these 3 frameworks have their own strengths and weaknesses and what you gain in cross compatibility, you often end up losing in low-level and speed. However, all three of these frameworks are incredibly robust and should make for a great app development framework no matter which one you choose to implement!
