Top 5 Frameworks for Cross Platform App Development

Top 5 Cross platform app development frameworks. Apart from desktop apps and websites, mobile apps have recently become integral to our daily lives in today's fast-paced digital world. According to a report, mobile app usage grew by 40% in 2020, expected to continue in the coming years.

With so many devices and platforms available in the market, it's important to develop apps that are compatible with all of them. It is at this point that cross-platform app development becomes relevant.

A cross-platform approach allows developers to create apps that run on different operating systems. Besides, the growth in the popularity of cross-platform apps has resulted in new tools and frameworks emerging in the market.

Due to this, we now have countless tools and frameworks that make it challenging to choose the right one.

To help you, we will discuss the top 5 frameworks for cross-platform app development, using which you can build efficient and user-friendly cross-platform apps.

But first, let’s understand cross-app development.

What is Cross-Platform Development?

Cross-platform app development allows developers to create software applications compatible with different operating systems and platforms like Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS.

While developing a cross-platform software app was time-consuming and complex as one has to build a backend that works with multiple platforms. Cross-app development has now become a lot easier using new approaches and frameworks.

Read: Top 10 Software Development Trends For 2023

As the native code is combined with independent code suitable for numerous platforms, cross-platform apps also have a native look and feel.

Now, without further ado, let’s check out the top cross-platform frameworks.

Top 5 Best Cross Platform Development Frameworks

So here is the list of the top five most commonly used cross platform application development frameworks.

1. React Native

2. Ionic

3. Xamarin

4. Flutter

5. Node.js

Software development processes and deliverables vary depending on the tool used. Therefore, you must choose the ideal framework to create a native-like cross-platform application.

Read: The Future of Software Development: Predictions and Trends

Now, let's take a closer look at each framework.

React Native

It is an open-source Javascript framework developed by Meta Platforms. React Native is used to develop cross-platform applications for platforms like iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, etc. Different businesses, including Facebook, Microsoft, and Uber, have successfully adopted it.

Features of React Native:

• Being open-source, React Native has a large community support that works on improving the features and fixing bugs.

• One of the significant advantages of using React Native is that you only need to write code once and use it anywhere for developing cross-platform apps.

• It has the lowest development cost.

• React is compatible with third-party APIs and Plugins.

• Its fast refresh rate allows developers to see the changes made in components immediately.

• As React Native focuses on the UI, building responsive and customized user interfaces becomes easier.

Ionic

It is an easy-to-maintain, easy-to-read, scalable, open-source framework that helps developers build cross-platform software applications. Ionic uses a combination of web and native technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.

Features of Ionic:

• It provides multiple UI components for developing apps supporting different mobile operating systems.

• Just like React Native, Ionic is also an open-source framework that allows developers to change its code structure according to their needs, saving a lot of time and effort.

• Ionic is based on Angular.js, which makes it easy to offer HTML syntax extensions to add attractive features and components to the application.

Xamarin

Launched in 2011 and owned by Microsoft, Xamarin is an open-source, cross-platform framework that uses .Net framework and C# languages for developing Windows, iOS, and Android applications.

Features of Xamarin:

• Xamarin uses C# for coding, making it easier to work with an array of operating systems.

• It allows sharing of 75% of code across platforms.

• Has strong community support.

• Xamarin.Forms allow developers to achieve a consistent look for their apps across different platforms.

• Compiled bindings in Xamarin provide compile-time validation for binding expressions, improving data binding performance.

Flutter

It is an open-source, free UI software development kit created by Google that developers use to create cross-platform applications. Flutter uses the Dart programming language for coding and uses many advanced features of it. Some of the significant Flutter components are Flutter Engine, Foundation Library, Flutter Development Tools, and Design-Specific Widgets.

Features of Flutter:

• The hot reload feature of Flutter allows developers to see the changes made in the application code without recompiling it.

• It doesn’t rely on web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as it has its rendering engine for widgets.

• Flutter supports portable GPU, rendering UI power to work on the latest interfaces.

• With Google’s Material Design support in Flutter, developers can build digital experiences.

Node.js

Node.js is another popular open-source, cross-platform backend runtime environment built on the V8 JavaScript engine. It can run on different platforms like Linux, Windows, macOS, Unix, etc. Node.js supports server-side and scalable networking app development. It can handle several connections concurrently and comes with a rich library of JavaScript modules to simplify the web app development process.

Features of Node.js:

• Node.js offers fast code execution.

• It uses a single-threaded method and event looping together.

• APIs used in Node.js are asynchronous, i.e., these APIs have a non-blocking nature. Hence, they move on to another API after calling it while the notification mechanism gets a response from the previous API call.

• Cross-platform apps built using Node.js output data in chunks to avoid buffering.

How to Choose the Right Framework

Choosing the right solution to develop cross-platform software applications depends on different factors. Still, the most important ones are

• The expertise of the development team

• UI Customization

• Reliability and support from the vendor

• Maturity of the Framework

• Framework’s capabilities

• Security

Choosing the best framework that suits your needs might be challenging without considering these factors.

How Can We Help

If you are a business owner looking for cross-platform app development but don’t know the framework that suits your requirements or where to hire developers for hybrid software app development. Then we at Decipher Zone have a team of experienced developers who can help you create a cross-platform app at a pocket-friendly cost.

All you need to do is contact us for a customized quote to hire developers and start the application development now!