The Ultimate Guide to Mobile App Frameworks

Choosing the right framework for your next mobile app is one of the most important decisions you'll make at the start of your project. The framework you select will lay the foundation for a successful app that can be updated and maintained for years to come. That’s why it's crucial to carefully consider your options.

The ideal mobile app framework offers strong support tools, testing capabilities, and libraries that help your team succeed. Whether you're aiming for cross-platform compatibility, code reuse, or UI enhancements, selecting the right framework will give your team the best chance to succeed in the marketplace.

Compared to native development, using a framework can shorten time to market, improve testing across devices, enhance quality assurance, and reduce the amount of code needed to target multiple platforms by 50% or more. However, it's important to be aware of potential pitfalls. Apps developed with frameworks must still meet user expectations for performance, user experience, and functionality on the targeted platform.

Whether you're building web, native, or hybrid apps, using the best practices of mobile development is key. The framework should enhance, not hinder, your app’s success. In this guide, we’ve compiled the top frameworks you should consider for your upcoming mobile app projects.

The Best Mobile App Frameworks to Consider

React Native

The single most popular mobile app development framework of the last two years, React Native has earned its place in a prime position amongst exceptionally tough competition.

Built by Facebook and released in early 2015, React Native boasts an impressive showcase of mobile applications currently using the technology. Capable of deploying apps to Android, iOS, macOS, tvOS, the Web, and Universal Windows Platform—React features a wide range of modern development and debugging tools. Additionally, direct access to the capabilities of each of these platforms creates a powerful tool for developers to lean on.

React Native applications are written in JavaScript—the most widely adopted programming language in the world. This makes React Native accessible to a large pool of developers interested in building mobile apps. The framework renders user code from JavaScript into platform-specific native code to be run on the device. React Native’s design enables the framework’s apps to use the same APIs as natively developed applications.

Another benefit that comes from adopting JavaScript is the wide range of libraries and tools available to accelerate development. This option allows existing JavaScript libraries to be built-in to facilitate additional time savings over and above what would be gained by effective code reuse alone.

The framework is built to integrate platform native code alongside React Native code in a single application. One of the key features this provides is the ability to integrate React Native into existing applications; even those which are already built and deployed. Teams can trivially reconfigure existing mobile apps to React Native ones and merge code across multiple platforms in incremental steps.

Drawbacks of React Native

The greatest strength of the React Native framework also introduces some of its most significant drawbacks. As a result of combining JavaScript and native code before building, the process of debugging and troubleshooting becomes that much harder. Developers are required to have at least some knowledge of the platform’s native language to determine what is happening underneath.

The React Native design impacts testing too. Because apps are compiled into two separate platforms from JavaScript, quality controllers must test each resulting app and its associated code. As a result, the React Framework doesn’t provide the same savings in testing and quality assurance that another framework might.

Another significant drawback, borne from the same issue, comes from a noticeable drop in performance compared to native applications. The framework claims near-native performance, but at times can leave something to be desired in benchmark testing. While likely only significant in extremely heavy-use applications, it is an issue worth considering in certain use-case scenarios.

Flutter

Although less mature and currently less popular amongst developers, Google’s cross-platform mobile app development framework includes a rich and promising feature set and highly robust design credentials.

Initially launched in 2018, Flutter has grown into a stable and dependable platform built with app performance and UI in mind. The framework’s architecture is designed around a reactive programming paradigm, something which is all but the de-facto standard across modern mobile application development.

Flutter supports building for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, and web applications from a single codebase with truly near-native performance. Unusually, the framework uses Google’s Dart language, one that is gaining traction but is still less commonly found amongst developers outside of the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

One of the framework’s strongest unique selling points is its extensive support for legacy devices running old versions of operating systems. For Android OS, in particular, the framework supports sharing identical UI between modern and legacy versions. This feature alone makes it an ideal way to target a broad user base with comparatively lightweight apps.

As another key feature of the framework, Flutter also features UI components tailored to each targeted platform. To ensure each app has the right look and feel for its environment, iOS widgets and layouts are deployed to Apple devices, while Google’s material design targets Android, desktop, and the web.

Our complete guide to the pros and cons of Flutter development takes a deep dive into the framework and looks at what makes it so productive and useful for mobile app development teams.

Drawbacks of Flutter

While the framework has come a long way in four years, the libraries and support available for Flutter are not as rich as those available to native application developers. The result is that developers may often find themselves implementing features that would take a fraction of the time to deploy and test in a native application.

Similarly, support for continuous integration and related tools is still somewhat lacking, particularly compared to other frameworks available.

Comparing React Native and Flutter directly, our guide to the superior cross-platform framework breaks down the important features of each to highlight the critical choices between these highly capable frameworks.

Xamarin

One of the most mature mobile app development frameworks available today, Xamarin does more than enough to keep up with younger upstarts and modern competitors.

Xamarin has been around in one form or another since May 2011. In 2016, Microsoft acquired the company and ever since has done a great deal to ensure Xamarin remains an up-to-date, modern, and well-supported application development framework. Like React Native and Flutter, Xamarin has remained open-source and cross-platform since its initial release.

Xamarin supports targeting Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS, and Windows using Microsoft’s ever-popular C# programming language. Xamarin is capable of sharing up to 96% of code between applications across multiple platforms.

In practice, the opportunities for code reuse are somewhat reduced due to the need for bespoke UI elements serving individual platforms. Nevertheless, the impressive level of business logic, data access, and even UI code able to be reused across platforms allows for some considerable time savings.

Under the Microsoft umbrella, Xamarin has gone from strength to strength. The framework now boasts a complete and feature-rich ecosystem with abundant support for continuous integration, test suites, and tools for the ever-popular Visual Studio IDE.

Similar to Flutter, Xamarin supports access to the underlying system’s native SDK when required. This means support for leveraging platform- and device-specific functionality such as sensor data or hardware acceleration. In contrast to React Native, developers don’t necessarily need to know the platform’s native language to debug it.

The support for developer tools alone makes Xamarin one of the stand-out entries among the currently available mobile app development frameworks. Creating applications at the forefront of mobile app design, Xamarin supports many of the features and functionality highlighted in our guide to the future of mobile app development.

Drawbacks of Xamarin

Adopting any framework comes with challenges inherent to extending the distance from the underlying platform. Support for platform updates, for example, will be delayed compared to those available for a native application. Xamarin seems to suffer from this issue more than most, with delays coming further behind than might be expected.

Xamarin also features more limited access to open-source libraries compared to native app development. Similarly, the talent pool of developers is significantly more limited than is available for either Flutter or React Native.

Finally, licenses for Xamarin at an enterprise scale are costly in comparison to related tools.

Swiftic

Unique on our list here, Swiftic is a no-code framework exclusively for iOS application Development. Designed to create, manage, publish, and market apps from the Swiftic control panel—the framework offers a quick and effective way of building applications for small businesses.

Created first in 2010 as Como, the platform now boasts well over one million apps for small to mid-sized businesses today. The brand’s unique selling point centers around getting businesses into the mobile app marketplace with a rich array of store integrations, booking systems, and customer-facing features.

When it comes to starting from scratch to gain a foothold and a well-earned place in the iOS marketplace, few solutions are as easy to use or quick to set up as Swiftic. In addition to building, the platform offers extensive analytics, marketing solutions, and pointers to maximize business through mobile engagements.

Drawbacks of Swiftic

Being a no-code solution, Swiftic heavily relies on application templates that make the design choices and functionality necessarily more limited than other solutions listed here. While there are customizations to implement your branding, there isn’t much scope for diverse designs and custom functionality when you inevitably go looking.

Similarly, the framework is missing some of the more advanced features that can be implemented with relative ease in other frameworks. As a trade-off for providing easy access to the iOS app store, however, these may be worth sacrificing.

Appcelerator Titanium

One of the industry’s most mature mobile app development frameworks, Titanium has supported cross-platform mobile application development since the field’s earliest days in 2009.

Similar to React Native, Titanium apps are built on JavaScript code and interpreted on the targeted device. The framework boasts building for iOS, Android, and Windows apps along with direct access to native APIs on each platform. The rich history of the framework lends itself to a large degree of refinement over the years, resulting in a reliable and well-rounded development platform.

Titanium’s well-established credentials have resulted in a sizable online knowledge base. The available support is some of the best out there, which is a strong attraction for many teams.

As a unique selling point, Titanium offers a lot more than just its mobile application framework. Titanium delivers real-time analytics to teams on their deployed applications. Providing lifecycle data and crash analytics, Titanium’s services do a great deal to supplement additional information above and beyond those already available on the Android and iOS platforms.

Appcelerator has put similar amounts of time into understanding how developers utilize their framework’s tools. Titanium features strong operability with continuous integration systems and strives to provide immediate support for every new release of the OS coming from every platform.

Drawbacks of Titanium

In common with other framework-based apps, Titanium apps are less suited to building instant-run mobile applications that do not need prior installation. The small size requirements of these apps make them better suited to native development, which has a smaller storage footprint by design.

Titanium’s well-defined API, while being feature-rich, is somewhat limited in flexibility. Designers are hemmed in by the available options, particularly for apps with slightly more “out of the box” ideas. Overall, the framework’s model-view-controller-based architecture is rapidly becoming outdated in favor of reactive programming paradigms.

Apache Cordova

With Adobe pulling support for Phonegap in the last year, the most notable choice for new apps and those looking to migrate away from Adobe’s ecosystem is the framework’s open-source alternative.

Cordova, somewhat unique to the frameworks already mentioned, builds hybrid—rather than native—mobile apps. A hybrid app is neither truly a web app nor entirely a native mobile application, deploying instead to devices inside a WebView container. The advantage is straightforward cross-platform compatibility which comes closer to the build-once, deploy-anywhere methodology that cross-platform frameworks aim to achieve.

At their core, Cordova applications use CSS3 and HTML5 for UI rendering and JavaScript for their logic. In this respect, Cordova apps are constructed much like any other web application. One of the key advantages Cordova features over related frameworks is the opportunity to take existing web applications into the mobile market with a comparatively small initial investment.

A wide range of plugins and tools exist to extend Cordova’s functionality when needed. The Ionic mobile app development framework, for example, extends Cordova with a UI SDK to create truly native-feeling mobile applications and platform-specific styling.

In modern versions of the Cordova framework, mixed native and hybrid apps have been made possible, though the necessary increase in complexity makes the approach prohibitive for many use cases.

Drawbacks of Cordova

Leaning on web technologies for mobile application development has a significant performance impact on the resulting apps—even compared to other mobile app frameworks. Similarly, the limited styling options made available by deploying applications as a WebView turn off many users who often expect a more consistent look and feel across applications on a single device.

Cordova applications in the iOS marketplace have had a tough time getting approval in the past. Performance issues and a markedly different look and feel to most iOS apps have both been cited as reasons for rejection in the past.

Other Notable Frameworks

To make our list as thorough as possible, here are some other frameworks that are getting attention:

• Ionic is a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development created in 2013. The original version was built on top of AngularJS and Apache Cordova.
• Onsen UI is an open-source framework. It enables you to create native-feeling Progressive Web Apps, as well as hybrid apps. The core library is written in pure Javascript, with an agnostic framework.
• Framework7 is an open-source and free framework. It enables you to develop mobile, desktop, or web apps. It can also be used as a prototyping tool.
• Sencha Ext JS is a JavaScript framework that enables you to build enterprise-grade web and mobile apps. It provides everything developers need to build data-intensive, cross-platform web and mobile applications.

Mobile App Development Frameworks Supporting Innovation

The framework you choose, if any, will ultimately be decided on by weighing up costs, familiarity, intended audience, and deployment targets. Impacting how you hire your mobile app teams,
Choose carefully and with expert advice, because the decision you make today will define your app’s success for many years to come. But you may be wondering: where do I get such advice? Pangea.ai has got your back. Simply tell us what you need and we will do all the research for you. In just 72 hours we will provide you a free list of 5 companies that are experts in the frameworks you are considering, and let you know how to connect with these experienced software development gurus!

FAQs

Q1. What are the top 5 mobile app development frameworks?

React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, Cordova, and Appcelerator are five of the most highly productive and effective mobile app development frameworks in regular use today. Each one is capable of producing highly attractive, feature-rich, and performant mobile applications that support multiple target platforms for developers.

Swiftic is an additional framework similarly worthy of consideration for its no-code approach to producing iOS mobile applications for small to medium-sized businesses looking to gain a mobile app presence.

Thinking carefully about the requirements of your application and the specific advantages you want your app to have will inevitably lead you to one of these leading frameworks for use in application development. Taking the time to weigh up costs, familiarity with the technology, intended audience, and deployment targets is well worth the investment early in the process to make the decision easier going forward.

Q2. What is the most used mobile development framework?

React Native is the most popular mobile development framework in use today. Capturing more than 16% of the development market, React Native is a highly productive and highly efficient choice for professional app developers.

Since being officially released in 2015 by Facebook (now Meta), the React Native framework has rapidly grown to be a leader in the field. For the last two years running it’s been the most used and most popular mobile development framework amongst mobile application developers. Capable of deploying apps to both iOS and Android devices, the framework now boasts an impressive honor roll of supported apps outside of Meta’s in-house ecosystem.

In second place, Google’s Flutter framework holds a little over 13% of the market share amongst professional app developers. Less mature than React and currently less popular, competition between these two giants in the mobile app marketplace is proving to create better tooling and functionality for everyone with more than a passing interest in application development.

Q3. What features are most valuable in a mobile development framework?

Ease of use, productivity, performance, and user interface are amongst the most highly valued assets of a good mobile development framework. Ideally, the choice to utilize a framework to deploy a mobile application should have minimal negative consequences on an application while providing libraries, features, and development assets that make an app faster to build and easier to maintain.

Depending on the use case, cross-platform functionality, device testing, and customizations may be highly valued by developers implementing a mobile application for their clients. A framework such as Swiftic may additionally offer an easier method of access to application development with no-code solutions or drag-and-drop coding interfaces.

The most valuable features of simplicity, branding, security, and customization will depend primarily on what the framework is being used to create and the industry it’s being created in.