Whenever the company decides to make a mobile application, the most important they are looking for efficient ways to implement the idea.
For most of the start-ups, the resources are limited and the time window is shorter. They want to reach more people in a shorter period of time, and without having to spend tons to get experienced Android/iOS developers (which tend to be very expensive), when they are just starting out.
A hybrid approach is tempting. By building a hybrid app, you’re able to reach more people, as you can have a web client, an Android client, and an iOS client, all with the same code base, plus same code for Native integration as it is cost-effective and faster.
“Hybrid apps are gathering popularity as they are cross-platform apps. Developers don’t need to code separately for a specific mobile platform. So, it takes less time to develop an app and the business companies prefer hybrid app developer for hybrid app development.”
Advantage of Choosing Hybrid App
There are many positive features of hybrid app development. Here is a listing of some advantages of building hybrid apps:
- Hybrid apps are platform-independent and reduce development time because a single code base works on different platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows.
- The development cost of hybrid mobile apps is lower than native or web mobile apps, the hybrid mobile app developers can fasten the development process with a set of huge libraries and development frameworks, it saves time and money to market the products.
- Hybrid apps offer offline support for applications which is frequently used by the user. Offline support keeps the users connected to some of their apps features even when they have poor connection or lose network connection. Therefore, these apps are more reliable and business can reach out to users even when there is poor connectivity.
- Hybrid App Development is based on a concept ‘write once, run everywhere’. Therefore, to improve your business on multiple platforms in a cost-effective way, there is no other alternative to cross-platform apps.
Here is the list of the most used and popular Hybrid Mobile App Frameworks using which you can create the hybrid mobile application that suits your business requirements without any hassles:
Popular Hybrid Mobile App Frameworks
React Native
React Native is one of the best hybrid apps. It is an open-source JavaScript framework for mobile app development instituted by social media king Facebook.
With over 81,253 stars on GitHub, it is a very popular hybrid app.
On Google Trends, it is on top while comparing famous hybrid apps.
One of the main purposes of this framework is to develop native applications over hybrid applications that run on a web-view. The coding for your applications will still be done via React and JavaScript and one of the features of it is that it is not very customized for the beginners but its active community can help you resolve issues (if there are any) at the quickest and the earliest.
React Native provides you Hot Reloading Feature. By this, you can see the changes made in the code, instantly. It is like a live preview. This feature makes it very easy in the designing of the apps.
Flutter
Flutter is an open-source hybrid mobile application development framework instituted by Google.
With over 75,815 stars on GitHub, it’s popularity is increasing rapidly and the community at large is trying to find out the best techniques. Flutter apps are created by using Dart Language. It has a key feature of gesture recognition.
First version was known as code name “Sky” and ran on the Android Operating System.
It is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for hybrid app development. Its amazing standard library of widgets, expressive, beautiful UIs, fast compile times, and amazing documentation, developers are falling in love with Flutter!
Famous apps like Alibaba.com, Tencent, Hamilton, Google have been built in Flutter.
Ionic
With over 39,067 stars on GitHub, is the open-source hybrid mobile app development framework that makes it easy to build top quality native and progressive web apps with web technologies.
Ionic is built on Cordova and AngularJS. Cross-platform apps created in the Ionic are small web apps that are running on a browser shell in an app that has access to the native platform layer.
It is based on Web Components and comes with many significant performance, usability, and feature improvements over the past versions.
This platform is most popular among the AngularJS developers for creating mobile applications.
Many famous apps are built with Ionic, like MarketWatch, SworKit, Joule, Diesel, etc.
Xamarin
With over 3717 stars on GitHub, it is based on .NET Framework. Software Giant Microsoft which is based in San Francisco introduced Xamarin. Xamarin is an open-source hybrid application and has a strong community of over 60,000 contributors from more than 3,700 companies. Developers who are skilled in C# language will be easily able to develop apps in Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS, and Windows using Xamarin.
Many famous apps like Storyo: Video Story Creator, Just Giving: Online Fundraising Platform, Olo: Online Food Ordering Platform, FreshDirect: Online Food Grocer, Insightly: CRM and Project Management, etc.
Apache Cordova
With over 131 stars on GitHub, Apache Cordova is a hybrid mobile app development framework originally created by Nitobi. Later Adobe Systems acquired Nitobi and rebranded it as a PhoneGap and released an open-source version called Apache Cordova. Apache Cordova applications use HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for cross-platform development. Generally, web applications are not able to access some of the core features like accelerometer, GPS or Camera, but in Cordova, you can.
Paylution, The DHS Program, Wikipedia and many more apps are built with Apache Cordova.
Bottom Line
There are pros and cons of all the platforms, but looking at a current scenario, Flutter is a fast-growing hybrid application framework and giving competition to React Native. As Flutter is powered by Google and React Native is powered by Facebook. Both frameworks belong to giant companies.
Both frameworks will save you a lot of money and time in development and give your apps for both Android and iOS which will give a high performance and experience to the end-users.
Based on my experience and research; I have come to the conclusion that we can leave the decision to the developers to select the best hybrid app framework for 2022.
Both are superior in terms, of UI, native experience, size and performance of the hybrid app development. These are best suited for your next cross-platform mobile application development.
