Considering smartphones are becoming so efficient in people’s lives, businesses are aggressively shifting their focus primarily on their business mobile strategy to get their products and services, quite literally seen. The mobile apps are companions of today’s human and social life with every small thing at your fingertips. Therefore, undoubtedly apps are a vital part of the strategy to reinforce your brand and reach out to wider audiences. While you can promote branding and create a logo using a logo maker or a slogan generator and get some cool branding ideas, mobile apps have become another preferable option.
There are different types of mobile apps like a native, hybrid, web, and progressive web apps that you can consider for your next mobile app project. However, the development of a hybrid app provides a glaring advantage in that it offers the best of both worlds: Native and web apps. And there’s not a question anymore about many other advantages of hybrid apps for both business and users.
The hybrid app frameworks are the ‘Avengers’ behind the triumph of hybrid mobile apps. Developers and business owners are actually making most of these advanced frameworks, useful for creating hybrid mobile applications in a cost-effective way.
Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks
How to choose the best hybrid mobile app development framework ?
Are you looking to build a hybrid app, but can’t figure out how to choose the best hybrid app framework? It’s a tough choice since there are several different frameworks out there. How do you know which is the best hybrid mobile app framework for you?
Not to mention, there is a lot of noise in the mobile hybrid framework space. Most hybrid mobile application development frameworks are offering a comparable set of features. But, how comprehensive are they?
Before diving into the list, it is helpful to know what you’re looking for in the hybrid app framework. Since starting off with the wrong framework can make it difficult to switch later on.
In order to make the best choice possible, you will have to ask yourself a bunch of questions such as:
- What is your level of expertise?: You will find frameworks for different levels of experience. Are you a beginner, intermediate or advanced developer in the hybrid application development field? For example, If you are a beginner you’ll want a framework that is easy to set up and has a low learning curve.
- What kind of hybrid app do you want to develop?: Here the main players are cost, speed, performance and compatibility of a framework that will help you develop the kind of app you want to develop. Also, the look & feel and user experience you want to provide to users of the app are important components in the decision making process.
- Does it meet your needs?: Having one that actually meets your hybrid app development needs is probably the most obvious point to consider. Knowing what you require from a framework will help you formulate a list of features that you need.
- Who will be using your hybrid app?: The success of your app will ultimately depend upon your set of target audience. So, when you’re choosing a framework, ensure to get a clear picture of the future users of your app, how you’ll add value to their lives, your purpose for developing a hybrid app, and who will be your set of target audience.
Top 6 Avengers in the World of Hybrid App Development
Luckily for our readers, we’ve done the research and compiled the top 6 hybrid app development frameworks for 2024. The best part is that all these frameworks are open-source (free of cost) and can be used for both iOS and Android. So, here’s the hybrid app framework list:
- React Native – Captain America
- Flutter – Iron Man
- Ionic – Thor
- Xamarin – Black Widow
- Onsen UI – Hawkeye
- NativeScript – Spiderman
React Native as Captain America
Captain America is seen as the leader of avengers and can be easily compared with React Native. Because React Native was at the top when compared to other hybrid app frameworks in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021. React Native is a solution to help you build natively rendered mobile apps on both Android and iOS.
This framework is tried and trusted by a large developer base to build apps, even Facebook uses React Native to build all its mobile applications. React Native is Facebook’s baby with an ability to create robust and complex hybrid apps from scratch. The great thing about React Native is it is based on React which is a JavaScript library.
Developer: Facebook
Initial Release: 2015
Written in: JavaScript, Java, C++, Objective-C, and Python
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 9+
- Android 4.1+
Popular Apps:
- UberEats – (Android app | iOS app)
- Skype – (Android app | iOS app)
Key Advantages:
- Biggest community due to greater popularity.
- Strong native-like performance.
- Features live and hot reloading that helps to see the result of code changes.
- Intuitive modular architecture which causes easy updates and upgrades.
- Almost 90% of the code can be reused across iOS and Android operating systems.
- Quick installation process because of the Node Package Manager (NPM).
- Reusability of codes can cause saving up to 40% of overall development costs.
- Takes less time to develop applications.
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Flutter as Iron Man
Iron Man is known for his intelligence and with the help of Flutter, you can intelligently build natively-compiled mobile apps from a single codebase, which is why he is the personification of Flutter. Flutter is a Google UI framework to help you easily build and deploy aesthetically pleasing mobile apps.
Google launched the first version of Flutter by the codename “Sky” in 2015. And, today the Flutter framework is making good progress in terms of popularity. No other mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) than Flutter provides reactive styles without any Javascript bridge.
Developer: Google
Initial Release: 2017
Written in: Dart
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 9+
- Android 4.4+
Popular Apps:
- Hamilton – (Android app | iOS app)
- Alibaba – (Android app | iOS app)
Key Advantages:
- Supports hot reload which results in fast code writing.
- Flutter works in a fast way to increase the time-to-market speed.
- Features rich widgets which can be customized or you can also create your own.
- Testing process can be faster because of a single codebase.
- Apps smoothly adapt to different screens.
- It has a UI first approach with many ready-to-use widgets to easily create interactive elements.
- Easy initial setup and apps have good execution performance.
Ionic as Thor
Thor is the god of thunder with a powerful hammer which can be compared with that of the excellent ability of Ionic to build an elegant user interface. Ionic is a hybrid solution to build mobile apps with outstanding front-end user experience or UI interaction.
With this powerful front-end Software Development Kit (SDK), you can create visually appealing hybrid apps by using an entire suite of tools. If you want to enhance the functionality of an app then Ionic allows you to integrate it with any Javascript framework such as Vue, React, and Angular.
Developer: Drifty
Initial Release: 2013
Written in: JavaScript
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 8+
- Android 4.1+
Popular Apps:
- Sanvello – (Android app | iOS app)
- JustWatch – (Android app | iOS app)
Key Advantages:
- Enables coding once and running that code everywhere.
- Easy to adopt as ionic has a low learning curve.
- Enables high-end integration of many configurable plugins.
- Easy and convenient app testing process.
- Plenty of UI elements.
- Require less app development time due to the use of simple technologies.
- Huge community support of international developers and contributors.
- Uses well-known technologies which saves the cost of hiring specific developers.
Xamarin as Black Widow
Just as Black Widow has versatile skillsets, Xamarin has versatile functionality with a wide range of tools for the developer. Xamarin is a framework used for cross-platform app development for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone in C# with Visual Studio.
Xamarin has been integrated into the .NET platform and lets you access the .NET ecosystem of packages and libraries. Remarkably, three of the amazing benefits of using Xamarin are continuous developer support, wide learning opportunities, and full technical backing by Microsoft.
Developer: Microsoft
Initial Release: 2011
Written in: C#
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 9+
- Android 4.4+
Popular Apps:
- Alaska Airlines (Android app | iOS app)
- Outback Steakhouse (Android app | iOS app)
Key Advantages:
- Xamarin applications can share up to 90% of their codebase across major platforms.
- Apps have almost native-like levels of performance to give the decent feel of native apps.
- Package of complete mobile app development toolset.
- Easy updates, testing and maintenance.
- Support of IoT, TVs and wearables.
- Minimal time to market and cost effective due to the feature of code reusability.
- Provides testing tools.
Onsen UI as Hawkeye
The impeccable archery skills of Hawkeye are similar to the ready-to-implement features that Onsen UI provides. Onsen UI is a UI framework that makes it easy to create HTML5 hybrid mobile apps while allowing you to use this framework with PhoneGap/ Cordova command line or Monaca tools.
Onsen UI is capable of easily building complex apps in less time with a wide range of components. And, this framework is compatible with jQuery and AngularJS.
Developer: Monaca, Inc. / Asial Corporation
Initial Release: 2013
Written in: JavaScript
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 9+
- Android 4.4.4+
Popular Apps:
Key Advantages:
- Enables developers to create apps with or without any JavaScript framework as Onsen UI is JavaScript framework agnostic.
- Provides automatic styling and a wide range of UI components specifically designed for mobile applications.
- Enables easy and quick development of attractive HTML5 hybrid apps.
- Optimized for performance on a large set of devices.
- Easy to learn with many learning resources available.
- Uses well-known technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
- Supports Monaca which is a powerful tool for development of HTML5 mobile hybrid apps.
- Allows you to build apps with no need for installation of the Android SDK/ IOS.
NativeScript as Spiderman
While the aim of Spiderman is to help others, NativeScript helps developers and business owners to build truly native mobile apps. NativeScript is a framework to develop well-crafted mobile apps on iOS and Android platforms with JavaScript or TypeScript.
When it comes to hybrid app development, NativeScript is your go-to tool which offers a runtime, bridge module along with a JS-based virtual machine. It is a framework that can deliver a native user experience to each mobile OS platform.
Developer: Progress Software (formerly Telerik)
Initial Release: 2014
Written in: JavaScript, TypeScript
Backed Platforms:
- iOS 9+
- Android 4.2+
Popular Apps:
- Daily Nanny (Android app | iOS app)
- Regelneef (Android app | iOS app)
Key Advantages:
- Allows developers to code once and run that code across several platforms.
- NativeScript uses developer-friendly CLI (Command Line Interface)
- Native user-experience and fully native performance on all platforms and devices.
- Allows users to directly access all iOS and Android APIs.
- Uses an XML-Esque-based markup language similar to HTML.
- Based on JavaScript which is a developer-friendly language.
- NativeScript is frame-agnostic means it lets you use JavaScript frameworks which includes Vue, React, Angular, Svelte or even Vanilla JavaScript.
- Easy and quick app debugging.
Conclusion
We hope that this list has helped you make your choice and will help you to give life to all your hybrid app projects. If you haven’t yet decided the best framework for you then ask your business needs to dictate which type of hybrid app development framework best fits your requirements and preference. For that, make a list to prioritize your business needs and see which framework checks most of your requirements.
Are you ready to use one of these frameworks (‘superheroes’) for your hybrid application development project? Share your experience with us, and tell us what framework you are using to create hybrid apps. At JoomDev, we are offering the best and reliable hybrid app development services to transform your app development idea into reality.
