Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks
Mobile app developers often face the situation when native technologies are incompatible with each other on almost all levels. These levels can include programming languages, architectures, work with libraries, operating systems, etc. As a consequence, to implement the same algorithms and user/business scenarios they had to create an application for several environments in different languages. To make the product support two platforms, the company had to increase the working time, budgets, and efforts for product maintenance. In addition, native app development requires certain expertise and knowledge from the engineering team. Cross platform apps tools arose to solve such dev challenges. Despite some weak sides, they facilitate and speed up the mobile application development process. Since the market has always been very competitive, tech providers take care of quality and strive for delivering advanced cross-platform technologies.
What is the Cross-App Platform framework?
Cross platform app development frameworks allow developers to create a mobile application that is compatible with more than one operating system, in this case, iOS and Android. It provides them with the ability to write the code once, and then run it anywhere for other platforms too, thereby enabling to release a product faster, safer and with better quality. Take a look at one of the best frameworks:
Flutter:
Google introduced an impressive cross-platform app framework back in 2017 named Flutter. It is a software development kit designed to assist in the expeditious Android and iOS app development. It is also a fundamental and primary method for developing Google apps. Flutter offers apps that easily and effectively run on multiple platforms with uniformity and dynamically. Here are some remarkable features that make flutter an ideal cross-platform framework among developers.
Flutter promotes portable GPU, which renders UI power, allowing it to work on the latest interfaces. Flutter does not require updating the UI contents manually, as it possesses a reactive framework. Developers are only required to update the variables and the UI changes will be visible after that. Flutter cross-platform app framework poses as a perfect choice for developing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as it initiates an expeditious development process and is also cost-efficient.
Ionic:
Ionic is one of the most remarkable and popular cross-platform app frameworks, based on AngularJS. It allows developers to use a combination of many languages i.e., HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS and Cordova wrapper to access native platform controllers. Ionic enables developers to create an impeccably creative user interface along with adding user-friendly features into the app. Apps developed with this framework are highly interactive and native-like, making Ionic perfect candidate for PWA development as well. It is an open-source front-end framework meaning it allows alterations in the code structure, suitable to each developer and saves a lot of time. This gives hard competition to its contender Ionic, in the battle of Ionic vs React Native. Ionic is based on a SAAS UI framework designed specifically for mobile operating systems. It provides numerous UI components for developing robust applications.
Another one of its most appreciated features is that it is based on AngularJS, making it easy to offer extensions to HTML’s syntax, core functionalities to imbibe useful yet attractive features and components into the app. This framework uses Cordova plugins which allow access to devices’ in-built features including Camera, GPS, and Audio Recorder, posing as one of the major benefits of cross-platform tools. The fact that Ionic gives a native-like feel to the apps is what makes it a favorite of developers. It helps develop cross-platform apps and allows them to perform perfectly on various platforms.