Whenever someone decides to create a solution for a problem on mobile platforms, the key value they look for is the efficiency of the solution they create.
For most developer ecosystems, the timeline is short and the resources are extremely limited making the decisions of choosing the right platforms extremely critical. It is common to use a hybrid approach in order to avoid spending lot of resources and time on developing individual applications for ecosystems. By a Hybrid app the reach is higher with the same native code and integrations as the same code base works across all platforms hazel free. It not only reduces the cost of development but also aids in reducing the maintenance and lifecycle management.
Advantages of going Hybrid in development
Reduces Development time exponentially as the same code base works perfect across different platforms.
Availability of frameworks reduce the development time even further compared to native builds.
Offline features helping users to stay connected with specific app features such as the Dino game on a google chrome even when the connection is disrupted.
Hybrid apps offer a write once run anywhere kind of implementation there by increasing the solutions reach to multi platforms without added costing involvement.
A lot of such Development environments have came into picture lately and are being used up widely for development and deployment across a lot of scenarios and use cases. The top few industrially used highly required frameworks that suit any requirement without hassles are listed below.
React Native
One of the most commonly used open source Java Script based hybrid app development framework. The framework initiated and instituted by the social media giant Facebook. Is a lightweight effective tool for any hybrid app development. With over 81k stars and 18k forks with a user base of 281k this tool stays on the top of the most used hybrid app development frameworks.
One of the main purpose of this framework is to develop native applications rather than a hybrid application that runs over a web view. The coding still being done on React and JS makes it easier for management . The major drawback it faces is it is not developed from a beginner friendly perspective. However the very active community base that react has makes it easier for anyone to grab and up skill themselves in this technology.
Famous apps including Facebook are built on react native.
Flutter
Developed over the Dart language flutter is an open source hybrid mobile application framework. The framework initiated and instituted by Google is gaining its trust and popularity very rapidly.The community at large aims to find the best techniques and trends to use the development framework.The key feature being gesture recognition the tool aids in developing intuitive UI/UX.
The first version code named SKY ran on the android operating system.
Googles UI toolkit for developing beautiful, natively compiled application for hybrid apps, Its amazing library of widgets, fast compile times, and amazing documentation are some of the key advantages the developers fall in love with.
Famous apps like Alibaba, Google etc are built on flutter.
Ionic
With over 39k stars and 13k forks on GitHub Ionic is an open source hybrid mobile application framework built on Cordova and Angular JS. Cross platform Ionic apps are small web-apps that are running on a browser shell in an app that has access to the native layer. It is based on web Components and comes with many performance, usability and feature improvements. It is mostly used by Angular JS developers for creating mobile applications.
Famous apps like Market watch, Sworkit are developed on Ionic.
Xamarin
Ionic is an opensource .NET based framework maintained by the tech giant Microsoft. Having a strong community with over 60k contributors and 35k giant companies using it.
Developers skilled at .NET and C# can easily develop apps for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS, and windows using Xamarin.
Famous Apps like Storyo, Justgiving, Olo are developed using this framework.
The Wrap
To wrap things up, there are pros and cons to all these platforms and frameworks. Flutter and Ionic are fast growing challenging frameworks to the existing most utilised framework React. All these being backed by multinational giant tech companies create a sustaining ecosystem of competing frameworks improving day by day.
All these frameworks save a lot of time and money invested in development, but at the same time providing the users with enriched user-friendly high performance experience to users on all platforms.
The best platform for Hybrid app development in the coming years cannot yet be defined as its evolving day by day, and each improvement moves the horizons of expectations by miles. All the above mentioned frameworks are superior in-terms of UI, Native performances and size of application. These would be the most suggestible and usable technologies for the coming years.
Top comments (0)