Selecting the Best Cross-Platform App Development Framework for Your Business Needs
Cross-platform app development has emerged as a lucrative alternative for businesses planning to leverage cutting-edge technology. This approach has multiple benefits — from shorter development cycles and time and cost savings to near-native user experience — which are all the reasons why it has emerged as one of the strongest competitors in today’s market.
Every other app development company today is working on frameworks and tools for cross-platform app development in order to reach a larger audience at a lower cost. As a result, the market is swamped with options. While all these options have their pros and cons, it becomes a task to select the right one.
What exactly is a cross-platform app development framework?
Cross-platform development frameworks enable mobile developers to create native-looking apps for several platforms, such as Android and iOS, from a single codebase. The ability to share code is one of the most significant benefits of this method over native app development. With a single codebase, there is no need for developers to write code for each operating system. This saves time, promotes code reuse, and speeds up the development process.
As the need for cross-platform mobile app development tools grows, so does the number of available tools. In this blog, we dive deeper into these platforms, how they differ from each other, and how you can select the right one for you.
Flutter
Flutter is one of the newest frameworks for developing apps for mobile, web, and desktop with a single codebase, and it holds a unique role in the market today. This open-source framework from Google runs on their programming language “Dart”, and empowers apps to perform consistently and dynamically across different platforms.
Flutter’s hot reload functionality allows developers to see how their application changes as soon as they alter the code, without having to recompile it. Additionally, Flutter is also compatible with Google’s Material Design, a design system that assists developers in creating digital experiences. When developing an app, developers can incorporate a variety of visual and behavioral widgets.
Node.JS
Released in 2009, Node.JS is a V8-based cross-platform application. The platform owes its popularity to its ability to transform a highly specialized language, such as JavaScript, into a language that can be used for a variety of purposes. Node.JS provides an open-source environment for developing highly responsive and scalable server-side network apps.
As the V8 engine translates JavaScript to machine code rather than processing it as bytecode, Node.JS runs swiftly. The framework has a huge number of JavaScript modules and can handle several connections at once.
Added benefits of Node.JS includes a large developer community support. Developers can constantly push boundaries with the V8 engine, which is considered one of the fastest dynamic language interpreters in the market.
Ionic
Ionic, released in 2013, is a popular AngularJS-based framework for developing cross-platform apps. It enables developers to access native platform controllers using a combination of languages, including HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and a Cordova wrapper. Because Ionic is built on Apache Cordova principles, the mobile apps created with it are hybrid HTML apps. The fact that these apps run in a unique shell on your smartphone is what sets them apart: WebView for Android and UIWebView for iOS.
Ionic enables developers to create apps with a stunning user experience and simple operations. Ionic is an excellent choice for Progressive Web App development because these apps are dynamic and feel like they were designed just for the device.
React Native
Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, released React Native, an open-source UI software platform, in 2015, a few months before Flutter. It is built on Facebook’s JavaScript library React and allows developers to create cross-platform mobile apps that appear to be customized for each device.
React Native combines the best features of JavaScript and React.JS and allows developers to create modules in Objective-C, Swift, or Java. Developers can perform complex tasks like editing photos, analyzing films, and doing other activities that aren’t part of the framework APIs by leveraging native modules and libraries in React Native cross-platform projects. Here’s a quick comparison of the frameworks with their key benefits:
Fig 1: Comparing the top frameworks for cross-platform app development
Conclusion
The industry is increasingly becoming about speed and reliability. More businesses are racing to develop and release apps in the market to gain a competitive advantage. But even then, selecting the right framework for cross-platform app development is a crucial step that can dictate the success of your app. All the popular frameworks in the markets have their own advantages over others, but there’s no one answer that tells which framework is the right one for you. Businesses need to evaluate their requirements, resources, experience, and other aspects to decide which framework best suits their needs.
Technogise has a penchant for solving the most critical business problems with technologies and has helped hundreds of businesses develop state-of-the-art apps tailored to their requirements. If you’re looking to partner with an experienced company, talk to us today to learn how we can help you.
