Did you know that one-third of mobile app developers use cross-platform development frameworks for building their apps? Understandably so. When you use a cross-platform mobile app development framework to create your app, you don’t need to create two separate Android and iOS apps. You create just one cross-platform app, and it runs seamlessly on all your target platforms. As a result, your development and maintenance resources reduce significantly when you get to use a single codebase to deliver apps on multiple operating systems, also known as WORA (Write once, run anywhere!).
Launching new features is also much simpler, as you don’t need to develop them individually for each platform. Just write your code once, and it’s ready to go for both your Android and iOS apps.
But to make the most of cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, you need to start with the right one. And to help you do just that, today we’re rounding up the best mobile app development frameworks for 2024 and beyond. But before we see the best mobile app development frameworks you could use to build your app, let’s first quickly see what a mobile app development framework is, how it works, its different types, and its benefits.
Simply put, a mobile app development framework is a set of different ready-to-use or customizable components (like UI design, code, and functionalities) that can serve different parts of a mobile app.
So what does this actually look like for a real app?
If you wanted to, say, add the sign in with Google functionality to your app and used a framework like Flutter to build your app, you wouldn’t have to develop it from scratch.
You could simply use Flutter’s Google Sign-in plugin, and you’d be good to go in just a few steps.
Likewise, if you wanted to add the sign in with Apple app functionality, you’d add the cross-platform’s Apple Sign-in plugin, and that’s all.
Essentially, you never have to start from scratch when you work with native or cross-platform frameworks for creating your app.
When it comes to developing mobile apps, you have two kinds of frameworks:
For app developers that want to launch their apps on both the app stores, cross-platform mobile frameworks offer a host of benefits.
Let’s now look at the top mobile app development frameworks that you could use in 2023.
Developed and maintained by Google, Flutter is the most popular mobile app development framework of 2023. With 46% of developers using this open source framework (with its adoption increasing steadily each year, up from 30% in 2019), Flutter seems to be replacing React Native as the cross-platform development framework of choice for mobile developers.
With Flutter, when you want to add a new feature to your app, you don’t need to do your development work twice, once for each platform (iOS and Android). You only need to develop it once. And Flutter will ensure that it runs “natively” on both the target operating systems. Flutter actually seems to be doing well at helping mobile developers deliver seamless iOS and Android experiences – all from a single codebase.
Also, Flutter is great for teams of all sizes. For Reflectly, an app serving millions of users and built by only two engineers, Flutter cut the development time by half while rendering beautiful app experiences on both Android and iOS from a single codebase. Before going with Flutter, Reflectly used some other cross-platform framework, but the experiences it delivered weren’t native, so the team made the switch:
Facebook’s React Native has been the most popular cross-platform mobile development framework for several years, especially until Flutter launched and became popular. As of now, it’s second only to Flutter, with 32% of mobile developers using it to build cross-platform apps.
From being one of the early adopters of the framework to being an official partner, the website builder company Wix trusts React Native to deliver consistent app experiences to its Android and iOS users from a single code base. React Native was the natural choice for the cross-platform mobile framework for Wix, as Wix’s website building tool (which is its main solution!) used React. That said, Wix remains one of the biggest React Native applications with over a million downloads and an average rating of >4.5. Clearly, React Native offers good performance. With React Native, Wix is able to share about 95% of its logic codebase between iOS and Android. Like Wix, a lot of (web) apps that use React default to React Native for delivering their apps.
Also, like Flutter, you don’t need to rebuild your app from scratch if you want to use React Native. You can choose the experiences you want to deliver through it. The social media platform Pinterest moved to React Native to ship only a bunch of its key features and functionalities as React Native showed the potential to speed up its development without compromising on the end user experience. Moving to React Native reduced the team’s logistical overhead too: “React Native enables us to share code between platforms. Code sharing not only means implementation time can be saved, it also reduces the cognitive overhead of sharing context when you need multiple platform-specific engineers working on the same feature. In other words, less time is required for standups and meetings, as well as fewer inconsistencies between the platforms.”
The eCommerce solution Shopify, in contrast, has been migrating its full native mobile apps to the React Native framework. Once Shopify added React Native to its development mix, it started adding newer experiences (features and functionalities) via React Native while also moving over its existing app(s) to the framework in the background.
React Native’s key features:
In all, React Native is a mature and proven mobile app cross-platform framework that can handle complex apps and serve at scale and is backed by a thriving dev community. Apps built with React Native can also be made to be very secure. This, too, is a key consideration when choosing this framework.
React Native uses JavaScript. This is one reason developers who want to start with a mobile framework prefer React Native, as they’re already quite familiar with JavaScript.
Unity is more of a game engine — powering 70% of the top mobile games — than a framework. So what’s the difference between an app engine and an app framework? Well, both are umbrella terms, but a game engine does a lot more than a framework and doubles up as a framework. Also, loosely, in the gaming world, the terms “gaming framework” and “game engine” are often used interchangeably.
Given that games are one of the most popular app niches, Unity is one of the most popular “mobile frameworks.” It’s the third most-used cross-platform mobile app development framework in 2023. Unity has consistently maintained its user base. About 12% of mobile app developers use Unity. This usage has been consistent since 2019 and has actually improved after taking a dip in the last two years.
Unity helps build games that work well across a host of operating systems: Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and gaming consoles. Packed with high-quality assets (that include almost everything you need for creating slick 2D and 3D games, right from slick graphics to animations and sounds) and backed by a community of millions of developers, Unity is easily the most mature gaming framework.
All that said, Unity’s pro license can be expensive for freelance or indie app game developers.
The third most-used cross-development mobile app framework, Xamarin, is now part of the .NET platform. So the latest update on Xamarin is that it has evolved into Microsoft .NET MAUI (short for .NET Multi-platform App UI). Apps using Xamarin are actually in the process of migrating to .NET MAUI.
With .NET MAUI, you get to use a single C# codebase and render beautiful app experiences across a host of operating systems including iOS and Android. If you want to build an app using Xamarin, which is now .NET MAUI, here’s a quick intro:
Ionic is another popular front-end, cross-platform mobile app development framework. Initially, Ionic only focused on offering UI components for building cross-platform apps. However, it worked great with the Apache Cordova framework, and by using both the Ionic and Apache Cordova frameworks together, you could do a lot more. Later, however, Ionic developed Capacitor, its own solution for replacing Apache Cordova, for developers who wanted to extend the Ionic framework for building cross-platform apps.
Ionic remains a popular mobile app development framework, and if you’ve a web app using any of the other popular frameworks like Angular or Vue, you can easily build native apps for it using Ionic and Capacitor. In fact, Ionic’s cofounder explains that web-first apps that want to deliver seamless experiences on Android and iOS devices should ideally use Ionic over React Native, as Ionic is built for such Progressive Web Apps.
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So there you have them! The top cross-platform mobile app development platforms for 2023 and beyond!
If you’re looking to launch an app in both the app stores, consider using a cross-platform mobile framework from the start. As you might have read through the user stories, doing so saves significant development and maintenance resources.
And if you already have an app and are looking to streamline its development and maintenance and save resources, consider adding a framework to your development mix. Many apps start adding newer functionalities via frameworks while gradually porting the rest of the app over to them.
About Adapty: If you want to offer in-app purchases and subscriptions inside your app, you need to develop an extensive in-app payments infrastructure. But you don’t have to… with Adapty. Adapty offers a robust in-app payments infrastructure that you can simply add to your app in under an hour. Adapty also offers seamless integration with the top mobile app development frameworks that you just saw, like Flutter, React Native, and Unity, among others, and makes your app monetization even easier. Check out Adapty.
Flutter is the most popular and fastest-growing framework dominating the cross-platform mobile app development framework market, with 46% of mobile developers using it for their apps. Back in 2019, it was the second most popular framework and powered apps for 30% of all global mobile developers.,
Flutter and React Native are two of the most popular mobile app development frameworks for 2023 and beyond. Ionic coupled with Capacitor is a solid option too. Xamarin, which has also been popular, has now evolved into .NET MAUI.
Consider the availability of the ready-to-use components it has for your project; the framework’s language, learning curve, and documentation; and your project’s speed, performance, and security requirements.
If you’re looking to learn a new mobile app framework, start with Flutter. Flutter is the most popular mobile app development framework in 2023 (and it’s only growing). Start by learning Dart to learn your way around Flutter fast.
React Native remains one of the most widely adopted cross-platform frameworks for developing mobile apps. The developer community, however, gives Flutter an upper hand over React Native because of Flutter’s widgets that significantly expedite app development.
Xamarin has been fully integrated into the .NET framework and has now evolved into .NET MAUI. It will be exciting to see how the developer community responds to this “new” framework!
Apache pulled the plug on PhoneGap in 2020. However, PhoneGap is available as Apache Cordova. That said, Apache Cordova, too, is rapidly losing its user base.
Apache Cordova is available, but it doesn’t seem to evolve at the pace that the newer and more modern mobile frameworks are growing, raising questions about what lies ahead for the platform. Its usage dropped from 29% in 2019 to just 10% this year.
Native Scripts is used by just 3% of mobile app developers as of now. Mobile app developers are clearly favoring the more modern cross-platform development frameworks over the older ones, like Native Scripts.
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