A look at 14 programming languages for mobile app development

It is expected that the increasing usage of smartphones and tablets is the rationale behind the growing surge in mobile application development. The world has already hit over 6.9 billion users of smartphones alone as of 2024, and this trend seems not to recede. Off this, it's projected that the mobile app development market this year will rake in some $935 billion in revenue—indeed, a large opportunity for developers and businesses.

In this blog post, I will guide you through 14 programming languages that are essential for mobile app development. We will explore their unique features and applications, helping you choose the right one for your next project.

Key Takeaways

• Mobile app development holds strong potential for huge streams of income.
• Being native, Swift and Kotlin have a good performance on iOS and Android, respectively.
• It is within the hybrid ones that cross-platform development with shared codebases can be found, like React Native and Flutter.
• Emerging languages such as Go and Rust are emerging with unique features and capabilities.
• Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each language will help guide your choices for mobile app development projects.

Native Mobile App Development

Native applications are developed for use with only one particular platform, either iOS or Android. In this approach, the performance and user experience are excellent because the developer designs the app to work optimally with the operating system it is built to run on. Major languages that are so important in native mobile app development include:

Swift (iOS)

Swift is a powerful new programming language—a way to write a native app for any of your Apple devices. It's easy to read and write, so that might just make it app-user friendly for the beginning developer. The main priority and goal of developers while smoothly designing the safe Swift are to hopefully help other developers to write safe software.

In quick succession, more than 90% of iOS developers now use Swift because the software development language is becoming very popular and efficient for mobile app development.

Kotlin (Android)

Kotlin is a modern programming language that soon became the de facto choice for most Android developers.

Over 60% of professional Android developers pick Kotlin because of its conciseness and advanced safety. Mobile application development is quite solid since the chance of application crashes is significantly decreased, with explicit avoidance of common causes of app crashes like NullPointerExceptions.

Objective-C, iOS

Objective-C is the forerunner of iOS app development in Swift. Almost obsolete today, it is still very handy, especially in maintaining older applications. In part, this is because the language allows for a dynamic runtime, making it flexible and helpful in some areas of projects.

Java (Android)

The association of Java with the development of Android has been around for a long. Java is integral, object-oriented, versatile, and world-class, and it has very wide usage and active support in the programming language, making application developers still use Android and prefer a big bundle of supportive libraries and frameworks for rapid development.

Hybrid Mobile App Development

Hybrid app development combines the native and web application features into one. This facility provides an opportunity for program developers to design multiplatform applications using just a single codebase. Some popular languages and frameworks in hybrid mobile application development follow:

JavaScript (React Native)

React Native is a Facebook-created framework that allows you to develop mobile apps using JavaScript alone. It makes it possible to develop native-like applications for both iOS and Android while sharing a hundred lines of code. React Native has gained a wide following because it is performant and has a developer environment that is very friendly.

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PhoneGap.

PhoneGap, now Apache Cordova, enables the development of hybrid applications in standard Web development technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The objective of the design is to make it much easier to get started in developing mobile apps for Web developers by harnessing existing knowledge.

Now, truly, PhoneGap is only Apache Cordova—an open-source development framework that will let a developer build hybrid applications using standard Web development technologies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This, in turn, makes the transition to mobile application development with a Web development background much easier, as existing skills can be applied.

Dart (Flutter)

Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications that are visually appealing on mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Flutter architecture is widget-based; hence, it allows very high customization capabilities and rich user experience enablers, and it opens many possibilities for mobile app development.

C# (Xamarin)

Xamarin is among the cross-platform mobile app development frameworks created and supported by Microsoft, in which developers can create apps using C# and should know more than one programming language. It reduces effort a lot because code can be shared across all platforms. Native APIs are going to be made available. So, the application will run natively on both iOS and Android platforms.

Mobile APP Development (cross-platform)

A cross-platform development method of a mobile app empowers a developer to develop applications that run across many platforms by using only one codebase, therefore saving time and resources to a great extent. Following are a few important and trending languages and frameworks being used in making cross-platform:

C# (Unity)

Primarily, Unity is a game engine but is also used to create cross-platform mobile apps. It is designed to use C# as its primary language and provides a very strong game engine for creating interactive and immersive applications.

Lua (Corona SDK)

Corona SDK uses Lua as its programming language and is designed for rapid mobile app development. It is particularly popular for game development due to its simplicity and efficiency in creating 2D games.

Java, Kotlin, Groovy (Codename One)

Codename One allows developers to write applications in Java, Kotlin, or Groovy and run them on various platforms, including iOS and Android. It provides a rich set of tools and libraries to facilitate mobile app development.

JavaScript (Appcelerator Titanium)

Appcelerator Titanium is a framework that allows developers to write apps in JavaScript, with native API access—so it makes the creation of high-performance mobile applications really possible and lets the user really feel that the applications are native.

Future mobile app development languages

With the continuous evolution of technology, many innovative programming languages have come into the mobile app development sector. Here are two of the most attention-seeking languages:

Go

Golang, or simply Go, has fast been gaining popularity in mobile app development. The ease of writing code and the efficiency resulting from its use make it perfect for developing back-ends, which can be integrated with mobile frameworks to come up with robust applications.

Rust

Considering that the main Rust focuses are on safety and performance, it certainly delivers an interesting perspective when viewed in relation to its venturing into mobile app development relatively recently. Such popularity and growth definitely count on its side. Great possibilities open up in preventing memory-related problems in the implementation of a solution based on Rust to build secure applications.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The mobile application development world is large and high-dynamic, and choosing a programming language will require one to consider several potential factors at play: target platforms, project requirements, and the expertise of the developers.

With these factors in mind, you can easily wander through the landscape of mobile application development and be sure of the tools that fit best for your needs.