Popular Technologies and Frameworks for Mobile Development

We saw a growing trend of mobile users in past few years. The technological enhancements have increased the growth multi-fold. Mobile internet users in India reached 371 million by Jun 2016, with a record growth of over 55 percent.

Looking at these facts it is very important to consider mobile platform for your next web application. It help business to reach to more people. For people it add lot of convenience to access information on the go.

In this post we will discuss about different development approaches for a mobile platform. We will also talk about some of popular frameworks that can help in quick development of an application for mobile.

So there are two popular way to develop any application targeted for the mobile platform. The first one is Native App development and the other is Hybrid App development. Native app development approach is there since start for mobile platform however Hybrid development is relatively newer app development approach becoming very popular nowadays.

Native Apps

In this approach the Apps are developed specifically for a mobile operating systems, following technical and User Experience guidelines of the OS. Each OS (Android/IOS/Windows) has its own technical guideline and we need to adhere to that. Due to this restriction we end up creating different applications for different Platform/OS.

Some key benefits of native apps are:

• Best performance
• High security
• Best user experience
• Easy/Direct Access to device hardware/software (GPS Location, Shake, Camera, Calendar etc.)

Hybrid Apps

In this approach the Apps are developed as web application build using web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS), wrapped in a native container (WebView/UIWebView). It utilizes the mobile browser capabilities to run the app in mobile.

Some key benefits of hybrid apps are:

• Portability (one code base multiple platforms)
• Access to various hardware/software capabilities (through plugins)
• Cheaper origination cost
• Faster speed to market

So at high level, cross platform hybrid development sounds great. However there are specific use cases where native app development suits best.

Speed to market, one source code, cross-compatible web technologies, easy updates, availability of resources, and lower (initial!) budget costs make hybrid applications very appealing.

Let's discuss some of the popular hybrid mobile development frameworks with their pros and cons.

IONIC

Pros

• Built using Saas and provides many UI components to help develop rich and interactive apps.
• It uses the JavaScript MVVM framework, AngularJS to power apps.
• Two-way data binding, interaction with backend services and APIs makes AngularJS a mobile developer’s common choice
• Designed with web application best practices like efficient virtual DOM rendering, hardware accelerated transitions, and touch-optimized gestures.
• Ionic runs inside Cordova/Phonegap to deploy natively, or as a Progressive Web App.
• Write once run anywhere

Cons

• Early adopter risk. This technology is still in its infancy. Support keeps changing, standards keep changing, libraries can be completely rewritten at any time
• Limited to UI capabilities of modern web
• Less flexible than native apps

Apache Cordova/PhoneGap

Pros

• Allows developer to immediately leverage existing web development skills (HTML/CSS/JS). Reduces training time/cost.
• Install just like native application and able to leverage app store discoverability
• Follows plugin architecture hence access to native API can be extended in modular way

Cons

• The plugin architecture works well if you can find the plugins you need or your web developers have to change gears to write their own custom plugins as needed.
• The Performance of PhoneGap app has always been criticized over native one. However improvements in device hardware and WebView implementation has narrowed the gap.

There are lot more frameworks available and we can not discuss all of them here. Hope you get fare idea on how to start for development of your next mobile application.