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31 May 2018 | By Jish
Topics: Best Framework for Mobile App Development
The use of mobile apps has grown significantly across the world especially in the UK. You need to take so many things into consideration before developing a mobile app. Whether you’re developing it for your company or clients, it can be quiet confusing when you’re trying to weigh up between the weaknesses and strengths of a mobile app. Whether you need to choose a Cross-platform? Hybrid? Or Native? Or even what do these terms mean? Considering these things upfront and thinking of ways out can help you move down the lane without a stumble.
Let’s begin by understanding the different frameworks.
A Hybrid Cross Platform development framework is a set of development, configuration and builds tools that allow standard web technologies (HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript) to be packaged and deployed onto a mobile device. The assets will be then uploaded to the Apple store for IOS or the Play store for Android.
Same as the Hybrid approach, Native Cross-Platform Development Framework cuts off HTML and CSS from the equation and allows the packaged app to talk directly to the mobile Operating System. This offers two advantages over the hybrid. Firstly the apps can use native User Interface controls (rather than mimicked ones). This can make development easier since there is consistency in devices and the applications will potentially run faster (since there is less processing to perform).
A Fully Native approach uses original tools from Apple and Google to specifically target the mobile device. They are developed as standalone tools and use different languages and development environments in each context.
Now, choosing between these frameworks needs to have certain factors by choice. There are 4 main factors which consider when choosing your mobile development platform.
Speed Considerations
This determines how fast the application need to be. The fastest one is a true native app written in Java (Android) and Swift (IOS), following the native cross-platform and finally Hybrid. The speed is an important factor in game apps. The golden figure for speed in mobile app development is 60fps and anything close to it. Usually, hybrid choices do not reach this golden figure.
Feature Support
The feature support means features specific to a device if you are building a cross-platform app. Some features of a specific platform may not support cross-platform and hybrid frameworks.
Framework Risk
Some of the frameworks may not support officially supported mobile development frameworks. Don't put yourself at the risk of choosing outside your supported framework.
Development Cost
To reduce the development cost, you must either have an in-house expertise of hybrid web developers or access with an external team. Otherwise, using cross-platform code is used to allow code sharing and to significantly reduce the cost of development.
Below is a choice of best frameworks and the supported devices
Even though there are plenty of choices in frameworks for hybrid mobile apps, the ones that are popular are the Cordova family of frameworks.
Apache Cordova is a development framework that is command line driven, it includes build tools that will take an input of (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and will produce something that runs on a mobile device.
Ionic is another framework built directly on top of Apache Cordova. Ionics integrates with the well-known Single Page Application framework called Angular. This means that the focus is on the product itself (as opposed to the services offered around it like with PhoneGap).
PhoneGap is a development framework created by Adobe that is built on top of Apache Cordova. A good analogy here is that it’s like an operating system that is running on a host machine (Cordova).
These tools allow a single language to target multiple platforms. If you are developing high-performance games with a lot of processing fully native is usually the way to go. But if you are creating common business applications cross-platform can present significant savings. There are a few main types of cross-platform choices.
React.js is an open source Single Page Application (SPA) framework that allows web developers the ability to build large-scale JavaScript applications for the browser. React Native is an extension of react that removes browser specific features and introduces mobile specific knowledge. Facebook are key contributors to this project. The supported Devices are IOS and Android.
The newest release of the most popular SPA Angular 2 has built-in support to Telerik's Nativescript. Although developed by Telerik, Nativescript is open source. It allows developers to target mobile devices using JavaScript or Typescript. The benefit is that Angular 2 is a very mature platform. Its supported devices are IOS and Android.
Xamarin uses C# to target multiple devices. It comes with a powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE’s) and will work well with Microsoft Visual Studio (via an extension). It’s a good choice for large corporates that have a lot of Microsoft developers in-house, and it supports windows phone too. The devices it support are IOS, Android and Windows.
The fully Native presents the least risk from a speed and interoperability perspective. However, it also presents the highest potential cost as there is no code sharing.
Objective C has been the dominant language for IOS development for years. It has a lot of support on the devices in terms of libraries and at the moment the majority of applications are written in it. Swift first appeared in 2014 and superceded Objective C for IOS devices. Development using both languages is carried out using OSX using XCode. IOS is the only supported device.
Java can be developed using Android Studio to target Googles Android operating system. It provides a very good developer experience and great tooling and support. It supports Android devices.
You can use either C# or Visual Basic alongside Microsoft's own tools to create windows phone apps. It would probably be better to use Xamarin in this case so you have the option to re-use code later down the line.
Conclusion
As we have already mentioned, in some cases where games are needed normal native platform may be needed but for the majority of cases cross-platform will be the best solution since it offers a write once deploy anywhere approach!
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