As most businesses want a simultaneous presence across multiple OS platforms to garner maximum outreach and audience, cross-platform app development is bound to gain more traction and popularity. In 2020, there is not going to be a major difference in regard to this popularity. Some frameworks are expected to lead the scene of cross-platform app development in the coming years. Let’s present them here.
Ionic
Ionic has emerged as one of the most popular and leading cross-platform app development frameworks. Built on AngularJS developers can use this framework for utilizing a combination of several popular languages including HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and Cordova wrapper. Let’s look at the key Ionic features.
- Ionic is an open-source front-end framework helps developers to alter the code structure as per the requirement and thus ensures optimum productivity.
- Ionic is built to satisfy the requirements typical of Software As A Service (SAAS) architecture and hence is great for mobile operating systems. The same aspect makes it rich with an array of UI components needed to build robust and feature-rich apps.
- Being built and based on AngularJS, Ionic offers the great capability to extend the HTML syntax for building useful and efficient app features.
- By using the Cordova plugins Ionic also helps developers with easy access to device functions such as Camera, GPS, Audio Recorder, etc.
- Ionic is also a framework that easily delivers a native app-like look and feel without losing the cross-platform credentials.
React Native
Among cross-platform app development frameworks, React Native occupies the pride of place because of delivering a highly native look and feel while helping to build an app that works great on both iOS and Android. A React Native App Development Company by bringing together the essential attributes of both JavaScript and ReactJS provides a fully modular development approach to write platform-specific modules in Swift, Objective-C or Java. Let’s have a look at the key features of React Native.
- React Native maintained by Facebook is a hugely popular open-source cross-platform app development framework with worldwide community support.
- Modularity and reusability of the code is a key aspect of React Native that made it popular for building apps across multiple OS platforms while maintaining the native look and feel specific to the platform.
- One-time coding and reusability of the code help React Native projects to gain the competitive lead in terms of development speed and faster time to market.
- React Native by offering a high level of compatibility with third-party plugins allows developers to integrate features and make easy value additions.
- React Native is a highly UI focused framework that helps to render a truly responsive and versatile interface.
Flutter
Google in 2017 introduced this versatile, flexible and feature-rich cross-platform app development framework that instantly became popular among the developers. Flutter apps offer unique dynamic features with consistent performance across all platforms. Let’s have a look at the key Flutter features.
- Flutter boasting of portable GPU capable to render UI on multiple platforms helps to build apps for a variety of interfaces.
- Flutter comes with a hot reloading feature to reflect the changes in code instantly on the UI.
- Flutter comes as an ideal lean framework to build MVP apps for multiple platforms.
Xamarin
Xamarin is the cross-platform app development framework from Microsoft that is capable to utilize more than 90% of the code for building apps across multiple OS platforms. With the help of a variety of APIs, the Xamarin framework is able to deliver UI aesthetics that suit the native look and feel of the OS platforms. Here are the key features of the Xamarin framework.
- Xamarin app development framework uses C# as the core language which can take over the capabilities of both Objective-C and Java.
- Xamarin is great to achieve native app features and functionalities. The framework completely does away with hardware compatibility issues by using a gamut of useful plugins and APIs.
- Xamarin also allows linking with native libraries to help customization and bringing native functions.
- Xamarin by providing full support to the use of Objective-C, Java and C++ libraries helps using encrypted codebases.
- Xamarin by supporting the WORA ( Write Once, Run Anywhere) protocol boosts the reusability of code and thus ensures greater productivity and faster development of cross-platform apps.
- Thanks to the compile-time checking feature of Xamarin there are fewer run-time errors with Xamarin apps.
Node.js
Node.js has appeared as one of the most performance-savvy frameworks for building cross-platform apps. As a leading JavaScript runtime framework based on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, it is the ideal framework for developing scalable server-side apps. If you are looking for a low-footprint and lean framework with high-end capabilities, Node.js comes as the ideal choice.
Features
- Node.js APIs are fully asynchronous and non-blocking in nature. This helps Node.JS servers to work independently of the API data. When it goes to a new API after making a call, the notification mechanism handles the response of the earlier API call.
- NodeJS is fully equipped to handle a multitude of concurrent connections besides boasting of a fully-loaded library of JavaScript modules. This makes the framework ideal for building dynamic web apps.
- Node.js has a library that is super efficient in code execution because of the fact that it is built on Chrome’s V8 engine.
- Node.js cross-platform apps because fast loading speed doesn’t need to buffer but is capable to load data in large chunks.
- Because of adopting a single-threaded model NodeJS really ensures a smooth and streamlined app performance. The event looping functionality further ensures better server response and scalable app performance.
Conclusion
From the above-mentioned elucidation, it is clear that all of the frameworks here are equally strong and efficient for building sophisticated cross-platform apps. In spite of some common rivalries like that of Ionic vs React, all of these frameworks actually can prove to be valuable for the appropriate and befitting app projects.
