Mobile apps are highly sought after as they serve as indispensable companions in modern human and social life, providing instant access to a wide array of services. To reach a broader audience, businesses consider mobile app development, but the choice of app type is crucial. Native apps are great for targeting specific platform users (Android or iOS),while hybrid apps offer the advantage of reaching a mass audience by working across various platforms, operating systems, and devices.
In addition to this, hybrid app development offers various benefits, including time and effort savings through the "write once and run everywhere" concept. Developers write code only once and store it in native containers, enabling deployment on different platforms.
However, with numerous hybrid app development frameworks available in the market, selecting the best one can be daunting for a layperson. Seeking assistance from an experienced hybrid app development company or developers can simplify the process and ensure the ideal fit for your project.
As a reputable mobile app development company, we take on the responsibility of guiding you in finding the right hybrid app framework. Therefore, we present a list of the top 10 hybrid app development frameworks to consider in 2023, accompanied by a set of essential questions to ask yourself before making a choice.
How to Choose the Best Framework for Your Hybrid Application Development Project?
Looking to build a hybrid application? Choosing the best hybrid mobile app framework can be tough with numerous options available. Determine your app development needs before making a choice to avoid wasting time and money. Ask yourself essential questions before selecting a hybrid app framework.
What type of hybrid app do you want to develop?
This will depend on various factors, such as cost, speed, and performance.
Who will be your target audience?
Knowing your audience will play a vital role in determining the success of your app. It’s important to know how you’d want them to interact with your developed app.
Does it meet your requirements?
Choosing the app framework that will meet your requirements will be crucial to fulfilment
What is your level of expertise?
The market offers various frameworks for hybrid mobile application development, catering to different levels of developer experience
Top 10 Hybrid App Development Frameworks to Build Multi-platform Mobile Apps in 2024
1. React Native
React Native is a top-rated hybrid app development framework according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2021. Powered by Facebook, React Native is a tried and tested hybrid app framework by a large community of developers. Even Facebook uses it for most of its applications.
With React Native, you can build natively rendered robust and complex hybrid apps from scratch for both the Android and iOS platforms. The framework uses a unique language named JSX for developing user interfaces. It lets you write HTML and CSS through React. The user interface components the platform possess are meant to offer a fast and enjoyable user experience.
React Native has an interesting feature of rendering changes instantly without even recompiling code or relaunching the app. Consequently, the cross-platform app development process speeds up and the app time-market is reduced to a great extent. With React Native, mobile app developers get the advantage of accessing a huge collection of libraries and open-source tools. Thanks to the use of JavaScript engines on each platform. Also, they can port different sections of their code to another platform without any hassle.
If we talk about the limitations of React Native, it is not a perfect solution for some interfaces, basically those with dynamic, complex or advanced designs. It would be hard to create for your application. Also, the platform does not offer custom models, therefore, you need to build some from the scratch.
Read also: Best React Native Apps in 2023
2. Ionic
Ionic is a powerful front-end software development kit (SDK) that allows the creation of visually appealing hybrid apps with outstanding front-end user experience and UI interaction. Using Ionic, developers need to create a single codebase for multiple platforms. Writing code with this multi-platform app framework is so hassle-free as it packs a set of libraries that are mobile-optimized with HTML, CSS background patterns and JavaScript components.
Other than this, the set of extras it provides power up the app development. Thanks to a camera, GPS, and health kits, mobile app developers can enhance your app's functionalities. They can even test every component while coding which enables the early detection of bugs or errors for a quality, error-free app development.
The collection of responsive widgets here ensures a flexible user experience and saves valuable time of developers as well. One of the drawbacks of using Ionic is that its apps are heavily dependent on native plugins as they support apps to offer native apps-like performance. But in several cases, you can't find the needed one and have to develop your own plugin which will definitely take time and effort. Ultimately, affecting app development time and cost.
3. Xamarin
Xamarin: Once a community project, Xamarin garnered popularity in the field of mobile app development after it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. It enables developers to build high-performance, cross-platform mobile apps in the Microsoft ecosystem while maintaining a native look and feel.
Allows app development using C# language and native libraries from .NET layers, Xamarin supports the creation of high-end apps without compromising their performance on different platforms. Also, the user experience of Xamarin-developed mobile apps is significantly better than other popular hybrid frameworks.
If the limitations of Xamarin-based mobile apps are concerned, they lack in performance in contrast to native apps. Therefore, it is not the best option for creating complex apps. Also, the framework does not feature hot reloading which hinders the inclusion of some app features in real-time.
Still, Xamarin is a good choice when it comes to hybrid mobile application development. Since it offers strong support, resources, and comprehensiveness to offer mobile applications a close-to-native performance.
4. Flutter
Google's offering Flutter has great demand among business owners looking for cross-platform app development. Within the last few years, the hybrid mobile app development framework has strengthened its position among emerging and evolving players in this field.
The reason being the app development framework has its own programming language, Dart- a combination of Java and Kotlin. Also, it enables the creation of mobile apps for different operating systems (Android, iOS and others) and devices (laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, etc.) using a single codebase only. That empowers developers to create highly productive cross-platform mobile apps with a native-like experience.
Read more : 10 Amazing Apps Built with Flutter Framework
Among others, Flutter's hot reloading feature that allows developers to see changes instantly can't be ignored. Along with its offerings like CLI and VI editors. Compatibility with Fuchsia and Google's mobile OS and impressive speed that is best for a hybrid app framework.
5. Native Script
NativeScript is a renowned framework in the hybrid application development field. It is one of the first choices of developers and business owners to build truly native mobile apps. Being an open-source framework, any developer can use this framework and develop mobile apps based on their experience with web app skills like JavaScript and CSS.
Other than this, its features and overall performance along with its compatibility with the latest mobile versions, up-to-date resource library and command-line interface strengthens its usefulness among mobile app developers. It has an outstanding feature that allows users to see the changes made in real-time without needing to refresh.
This saves a lot of developers' time by keeping them in the flow. Besides, it has several other features that make it a feature-rich option that is easy to use and cost-effective.
6. Mobile Angular UI
Mobile Angular UI is an open-source UI framework that allows the creation of gen z web and mobile applications in the least time possible. It is a perfect blend of HTML5, AngularJS and Bootstrap. Those who have the knowledge and hands-on experience of Twitter Bootstrap and AngularJS can easily learn to use Mobile Angular UI and develop hybrid mobile applications.
With the Mobile Angular UI, developers get the ease of using JavaScript libraries like FastClick.js and Overthrow.js for web and mobile app development. Some of its components are highly useful and provide an excellent user experience. This includes overlays, scrollable areas, switches, sidebars, etc.
7. Onsen UI
Released in 2013, Onsen UI is an open-source framework under the Apache v2 license. Being a framework-agnostic UI component, Onsen UI can be used among different frameworks for hybrid app development. Likewise, AngularJS, Angular, React, Vue.js and other JavaScript frameworks.
Onsen UI architecture consists of three different layers including CSS components, Web components, and framework bindings. In addition to this, it equips a vast collection of ready-to-use, responsive and out-of-the-box components. Developers can use this free-to-use framework for commercial projects since it is easy to use, flexible and has semantic markup components. This enables the creation of HTML-based complex apps in the least time possible.
8. PhoneGap
PhoneGap or Apache Cordova is one of the most preferred mobile app development frameworks. It is a cross-platform application development framework and is highly popular among the developers' community owing to its development friendliness. Using this hybrid framework, they can easily build mobile apps on CSS3. HTML5, and JavaScript.
In addition to this, the platform gives users the leniency of utilizing smartphone Hardware, thanks to the offered set of plugins. They can use an accelerometer, camera, GPS and other smartphone components to provide end-users with a native app-like experience. The major highlight of the PhoneGap hybrid framework is its ability to develop mobile apps at a rapid pace, thanks to single codebase development. Also, it allows the administration of third-party applications.
Among others, developers can get access to Native APIs, strong backend support, UI libraries to update interfaces, etc. PhoneGap has an outstanding feature named Build. It's a cloud compiler that provides the ease of compiling apps without even installing any SDK. Developers can easily mould a complex, feature-rich and tailored hybrid mobile app. Mobile apps that can reach a wider range of audiences target different platforms while performing efficiently. All in all, PhoneGap is best, if you want to create mobile web apps that are not complex yet easy to use and understand. Also, if there is a cash crunch, PhoneGap is good to go with as a hybrid app development framework.
9. Aurelia
Licensed under the MIT license, Aurelia is an open-source, free-to-use hybrid mobile app framework. It is basically a collection of modern JavaScript modules. When used in combination, it turns out as a powerful platform to build browser, desktop and mobile applications. Other than this, developers can use its modules separately for any of their JavaScript or Node.js projects.
Aimed at writing clean and powerful code, Aurelia allows users to create components using Vanila JavaScript or TypeScript. The company claims it is the only platform that allows it to do so. Aurelia strictly adheres to web standards that allow users to integrate it with any framework or library available in the market.
If the features of Aurelia are considered, some of its most powerful modules come packed with binding, dependency injection, metadata, routing and templating. Other than this, users get the aid of plugins for internationalization, state management and validation. Whereas the set of tools includes CLI, Chrome debugger, VS Code plugin and others. Based on a high-performance reactive system, Aurelia DOM batches update way faster than Virtual DOM-based frameworks.
10. Kendo UI
When it comes to mobile app development, Kendo UI is one of thebest hybrid app development frameworks for 2023. It provides developers with an extensive collection of JavaScript UI components with the libraries of Angular, React, JQuery and Vue. Using Kendo UI, developers can easily and quickly build eye-catching, responsive and high-performance hybrid mobile apps. No matter which JavaScript framework, they have opted for mobile app development.
Powered by Progress Telerik (the parent company of NativeScript as well),Kendo UI is an open-source hybrid app framework. Though, it is aimed at enterprise customers. Therefore, no free version of this hybrid app toolkit is available in the market. Still, it manages to garner greater sales owing to its key highlights. Likewise, world-class support and the guarantee that each of its components is tested thoroughly by their strict QA process.
Kendo UI enjoys a reputed and highly considerable client base across the globe. Including top honchos like HP, NASA and over 140K other companies globally. If you are looking for an enterprise-grade solution with dedicated support, Kendo UI is sure to go with a hybrid app development framework.
Conclusion
Explore the significance of mobile app development in the digital era and discover how to select the perfect companion as a hybrid app framework. We've compiled a list of the top 10 hybrid mobile app development frameworks after extensive brainstorming, research, and experience from our expert hybrid app developers. If you have any doubts or queries related to hybrid mobile application development, feel free to connect with our team of expert mobile app developers.
