Most major businesses today use mobile applications to increase their reachability and interact with customers. They boost customer relationships, improve sales, and strengthen your brand image.
You can code a mobile application from scratch. However, it makes more sense to use development frameworks.
Mobile app development frameworks are tools that assist with some of the most complex tasks involved in the development process. They not only make it easier, but they also speed up development, allowing you to reach market more quickly.
Let’s take a look at which frameworks are the best ones to use today.
What Are Mobile Development Frameworks and Why Should You Use Them?
Mobile app development frameworks are software frameworks designed to support mobile application development. They allow you to develop features, debug your code, and deploy mobile applications. These frameworks include programming interfaces, compilers, and debugging tools to perform these tasks. Using these frameworks saves development time and resources since components can be directly reused from their libraries.
5 Mobile App Development Frameworks to Use in 2024
Now that you know why you should be using a framework, how do you know which ones to leverage? Here’s a list of the 5 top mobile app development frameworks for 2024.
1. Flutter
Flutter is a powerful open-source UI framework for application development. It was created by Google in 2017 and is mainly used for cross-platform mobile development for both iOS and Android. It allows you to build native, multipurpose mobile applications with a single codebase (i.e., you don’t need to develop different applications for both Android and iOS).
Flutter is incredibly fast when compared to other frameworks. This is because it uses declarative UI, which only renders widgets when their state changes. This feature is called hot reload. You can also reuse Dart UI elements for iOS and Android.
2. React Native
React Native is a cross-platform mobile framework created by Facebook. It allows you to create React applications on a JavaScript base. In addition, it acts as a bridge between the application and the platform (i.e., if it detects any changes in the JavaScript module, it creates an event that updates mobile components).
React Native is open-source, and you can use it to develop applications for both iOS and Android. Using APIs, you can transform JavaScript code into native components and use them to create an actual native application. This is very useful for MVP applications that work on client-server architecture.
3. Xamarin
Xamarin is an open-source project for cross-platform application development. It was created in 2011 and Microsoft acquired it in 2016. Xamarin saves development time and cost since it allows you to share code across platforms. For example, its Xamarin forms feature allows engineers to create reusable UIs for Android, iOS, and Windows.
Xamarin uses C# and F# programming languages and is based on the .NET framework. Therefore, you can easily deploy it on Azure as it’s part of the Microsoft ecosystem.
4. Ionic
Ionic is a popular open-source framework for designing Android and iOS. Since it uses frontend languages such as HTML and JavaScript, you can use it to create cross-platform app components.
Ionic works with Cordova, which allows it to create extensive UIs for native deployment. It is compatible with multiple JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.
5. SwiftUI
SwiftUI is an iOS development framework that was launched in 2019 with a focus on UI development. It allows you to create different views and layout structures for cross-platform development (iOS, macOS, and watchOS). In addition, you can also use event handlers to create different input responses for your application, such as touch and gesture.
BI engineers can use Swift charts to create visualizations for information display. You can also create custom layouts and align your views through its grid API. In addition, its ViewThatFits feature allows you to specify multiple view variations for a single screen. If that specific page is requested, SwiftUI selects the child view that is ideal to fit within that space and automatically displays it.
So Which One Should You Choose?
The real purpose of a framework is to add agility and scalability to your infrastructure. All mobile app development frameworks have different learning and adoption curves. It depends on what attributes you are looking for in a framework, such as scalability, support, and integration capabilities with your other technologies. Once you figure that out, you can easily decide on a framework based on your infrastructure requirements.
In any case, the mobile app development frameworks on this list will allow you to complete your project more quickly and seamlessly. They are indispensable tools to add to your arsenal.
