Top 10 Mobile App Development Frameworks to Build a Robust App in 2021

May 14, 2021

Introduction

There has been an exponential rise in the number of smartphone users all over the world. As per the research done by ‘Statista’, the number of smartphone users that were 274 million in 2018 has grown to 298 million by 2021. Along with this, there has also been a rapid increase in the number of mobile app development frameworks.

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Source

You would be surprised to know that due to such high growth of mobile apps all over the globe, the mobile app development market has observed a CAGR of a whopping 14.3% and will reach 100 billion USD by the end of 2022. If you’re aware a top mobile app development company would always prefer using the best app development frameworks to create apps for respective platforms.

If you observe the current market then you would learn that mobile apps are ruling the application market. Mainly because they fit inside your pocket, account for a faster user experience, and are efficient with working offline as well. The extensive features and usability that a mobile app provides have made many websites switch to mobile apps.

Are you someone who has a potential app idea and is looking forward to creating an app for the same? Then stay glued as this blog brings you the top mobile app development frameworks that you can choose for your next project. Let’s begin!

Overview: App Development Frameworks

There was a time in the app development world when fixing bugs or offering updates was considered a cumbersome task. Nowadays, if you have the basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS you can easily build a native app or a cross-platform application.

Let’s have a look at a few statistics of mobile app development that would help us paint a clearer picture.

Statistics

Gaming applications are the most popular apps created and account for 25% of all the apps combined.
In 2019, users downloaded about 21.3 billion apps from Google play.
Apple dominates the market in terms of consumer spending. They account for 64% of the worldwide share.
By 2023, mobile apps are predicted to generate a whopping 9935 billion USD through in-app advertising and paid downloads.
As of 2019, the number of apps available for download on Google and Apple app stores was 2 million and 1.83 million respectively.

statistic_id269025_total-global-mobile-app-revenues-2014-2023

Source

Mobile applications are the best choice to make when one has limited time and resources. The frameworks also offer, a choice as per your budget and time. If you have plenty of time you can opt for native frameworks but if the opposite is true you can choose cross-platform app development.

But from a bird’s eye view, both native and cross-platform markets have their value in the app development world. Frameworks today are assisting mobile app development frameworks to create compatible and scalable mobile applications. Here are a few benefits that frameworks have introduced to mobile app development.

Fast Integration
Easy Development & Rapid Deployment
Fuels Interoperability
Efficient Services

Let’s understand the preceding benefits in brief.

Fast Integration:

Using a mobile SDK you can add pace to the closing of your deals. This happens as the devkit will shorten the sales cycle and easily integrate with the existing tech stack.

Easy Development & Rapid Deployment:

An average Android app consumes 18.2 3rd party SDKs that go even higher in a game. You should learn this for a fact that no developer in the world spends time designing every single tool from scratch. This is the benefit of using an SDK, it offers many development tools and libraries that assist the developers in testing and building a variety of apps at a much faster pace.

For instance, to obtain code that works for an Android device one can obtain code from Facebook’s Android SDK toolkit. Using this one doesn’t have to code everything from scratch. This accounts for efficient development and rapid deployment of apps.

Fuels Interoperability:

If the product you’re offering becomes a massive hit and other apps and tools want to integrate with your product, that can be easily done using an SDK. Hence, using an SDK fuels interoperability and adds to your brand recognition. An SDK is what allows you to create and share-worthy tech on a large scale.

Efficient Services:

An SDK allows your designers to concentrate well on your design and helps create an engaging user interface. Using this you can control not only how your product integrates with other apps but also how it looks. You can do all this while not compromising on the user experience. Hence, an SDK provides an efficient browser service.

Now, that you’ve learned the benefits that these frameworks invite into your app development process, let’s dive into the main subject.

Top 10 Mobile App Development Frameworks in 2021

Numerous frameworks are used by the developer community and each has its preference. Hence, no one framework can be coined as the best of all, but here’s a comprehensive list of all that our team of experts curated.

Flutter
React Native
Native Script
Xamarin
Adobe Phone Gap
Ionic
Appcelerator Titanium
Mobile Angular UI
JQuery Mobile
Corona

Let’s catch a glimpse of what each of them has to offer.

Flutter

Flutter has been developed by the tech giant Google and was released in 2017. It is an end-to-end free and open-source SDK. Using Flutter one can build applications for Linux, iOS, MAC, Android, Windows, and the web with a single codebase.

Though Flutter has been released way after its competitor React Native, it has been named a ‘Dark Horse’ in the race. As recommended by Flutter App Development Company, it is believed to be a hot favorite if you plan on creating an MVP first.

Flutter is also an incredibly powerful framework when it comes to creating interactive and 2D mobile apps. It efficiently manages every pixel on the screen and accounts for the same user experience on different devices. One of the other highlights of Flutter is the Hot Reload feature that maps code changes instantly.

Here are some of the other benefits of using Flutter.

Rapid App Development
Myriad Widgets & Themes
Extensive Documentation
Compatibility

Renowned companies using Flutter frameworks: BMW, eBay, Alibaba & Google

React Native

React Native was introduced by Facebook in 2015. It’s a cross-platform and open-source app development platform that makes use of React.js and JavaScript to develop Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android apps. React Native is currently the top JavaScript framework that functions on the objective “Learn once, write anything”.

There have been many arguments on the performance of cross-platform apps not being equivalent to that of native apps. But React Native promises to offer apps that perform almost identical to native apps. To offer this experience React Native offers a set of components such as Texts, Views, Images mapped to native UIs building blocks. Some of the other stand-out features of the framework are as follows.

Third-party Library Support
Built-in & Community Driven APIs and Components
Live Reload
Highly Responsive Interface
Less Code

Renowned apps created using React Native App Development: Shopify, Bloomberg, Walmart, Facebook & Uber.

Native Script

Native Script is one of the best frameworks to build native iOS and Android apps making use of TypeScript, JavaScript, Angular, or Vue.js. The source code for coding apps on this framework is written in web languages while the apps can directly run on native devices without making use of DOM manipulation and WebViews.

Core modules, CLI, plugins, and runtimes account for NativeScript’s primary components. The core modules offer abstractions to access native platforms. Using the CLI you can create and run apps. Plugins are the building blocks that promote faster development and the Runtimes call the native APIs using JavaScript. Some of the evident benefits over other frameworks are.

Zero Native API access
Huge collection of Repository Plugins
Doesn’t render UI with webview
Architectural choices such as Vue, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Angular.

Renowned apps created using Native Script: Dwitch & Daily Nanny, Bitpoints, Strudel.

Xamarin

Xamarin is a cross-platform and open-source app development framework that uses C# as its programming language. It end can create high-end, modern, and high-performing apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. The framework allows developers to share more than 90% of their applications across all major platforms. It also works on a singular codebase which reduces the development cost and time.

Xamarin is well-known for offering a flexible native performance that helps render a unique user experience to its consumers. It has an abstraction layer that controls the communication between the shared code with underlying platform code. Developers can develop an ecosystem using API, components, backend, and more. The framework supports various programming languages, libraries, and tools with an active community for iOS, Android, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Windows.

Here are a few stand-out features offered by the framework.

Diagnosing Tools
SIngular Code Base
Storyboard Files
Android SDK Manager
Compatibility with Tv, IoT, and Wearables
Google emulator manager

Apps that use the Xamarin framework: Microsoft News, BBC Good Food & Alaska Airlines.

Adobe Phone Gap

The platform was introduced to the world in the year 2009. Most people are acquainted with their old name Apache Cordova that was later changed to Adobe PhoneGap as Adobe acquired the company Nitobi in 2011. The framework offers the convenience of using the platforms such as JavaScript, Web APIs, HTML 5, and CSS to develop cross-platform apps.

One can create the best-in-class by offering support to hardware such as camera, storage, GPS, and accelerometer. Using the framework you can create lightweight and robust apps that are feature-rich.

Here are some of the pros of choosing PhoneGap App Development.

Native functionality
Huge Developer Community
Augmented Reality Cordova Plugin
Best to create Enterprise-level apps

Apps build using Phone Gap: Health Tap, TripCase, Paylution, Buildr, Wikipedia.

Ionic

Ionic is a framework that was released in 2013 by Drifty. The platform makes efficient use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript while offering integrations with Angular, React, Vue, and Apache Cordova to build apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Progressive Web Apps. The framework has improved drastically over the years and is widely used to enhance performance with minimal DOM.

Ionic is free for use and is one of the most used frameworks due to its customizable tools, predefined elements, and extensive features like Live Reload.

Here are some of the pros of using Ionic.

Free to use
Extensive UI
Easy review with Liver-Load.

Apps created using Ionic App Development: EA Games, NHS, & Southwest Airlines

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is an open-source cross-platform app development platform. It released in 2008. It can be used to create apps for Windows, Android, iOS with a single JavaScript codebase.

MVC-based framework alloy, direct access to native APIs using Hyperloop, and cross-platform API for accessing native UI and device functionality are some of the core features of Titanium SDK. One can easily integrate with Salesforce, MS Azure, MS SQL, Mongo DB, and Box. Developers can also deploy data models with no setup efforts using the schema-less database ArrowDB.

The framework observes 5000 APIs to develop cross-platform apps using which a developer can create multiple platforms reusing 90% of the code.

Famous apps created using Appcelerator Titanium: CBC Media, MIT, Pulse, & Body Shop.

Try this blog: How to prioritize app features for MVP development?

Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is a mobile UI framework that uses Bootstrap, AngularJS, and HTML5. If you’re familiar with Angular JS and Twitter Bootstrap then you don’t have much to worry about.

The framework offers awesome mobile components that such as scrollable areas, overlays, switches, sidebars, and absolute positioned bottom and top navbars that don’t bounce on scroll. To enhance the mobile experience the app relies on robust libraries such as overthrow.js and fastclick.js. This makes Angular UI a perfect framework to create modern mobile and web applications.

Here are some of the stand-out features of this framework.

Huge Community
Default Controls
Responsive Framework
Independent of JQueries
Smooth transition from web to mobile apps

Famous apps created using Mobile Angular UI: Gunks, iKeyBox, Hotelier News, Guezz It, Zaobao Mobile Website.

JQuery Mobile

This framework was developed by the JQuery developer team and was released in the year 2006. It happens to be a strong user interface system that is based on HTML5 that supports many operating systems such as Firefox, Windows, Kindle, Mac, and more. The simple API and responsive framework allow developers to create apps at a rapid pace.

One can also develop user-friendly and interactive web pages using JQuery. One of the other specialties of this framework is the HTML-based ThemeRoller that offers highly customizable themes.

Some of the other stand-out features of the framework are as follows.

Lightweight & Compact
Created using core JQuery
HTML5 Configuration
DOM Elements
CSS Manipulation
Simple API

Corona

Corona is an open-source and free hybrid framework that is used to design mobile apps for games for desktops, mobiles, smart TVs, and tablets. It’s powered by a lightweight scripting language and Lua-based framework that offers ease of usage, flexibility, and speed to develop apps.

We use this framework to build cross-platform apps in a short period. It offers high functionality with various platforms such as Android, Nook, and iOS.

Here’s a list of some of the prominent features of Corona.

Native Library
Performance and Speed
Easy to Setup
Simulated in Real-time

Examples of apps created using Corona: Zip Zap, Beasts Battle 2, Gunman Taco Truck, & Designer City.

Wrapping Up

This brings us to the end of this blog. Above we learned the benefits that SDKs offers to the process of app development followed by the top 10 mobile app development frameworks.

We – Technource is expert in developing mobile apps and has successfully done so for the past 9 years. If you are looking forward to hiring a mobile app developer you have just come to the right place.

We are specialists in iOS app development and Android app development. You can observe the case studies of the most prominent projects on our Technource website and know for yourself. We also recommend our clients develop MVPs to validate their idea and test the waters before putting all their eggs in one basket.

If you’re an entrepreneur with a potential business idea in search of a top mobile app development company, then we will surely like to hear from you. Sign up for a simple consultation form on our website and get in touch with us today. Thank you for reading.

Sanjay Singh Rajpurohit

Mr. Sanjay Singh Rajpurohit, An early-aged entrepreneur who always leads his team from the front and achieved success. As the founder & CEO of Technource, a top web, and mobile app development company, he made a global presence in a short time by offering custom software development, premium mobile apps and website development services.

Top 10 Mobile App Development Frameworks to Build a Robust App in 2021

Table of Content

Introduction