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Hybrid apps are the perfect middle ground between functionality and cost, helping businesses overcome their dilemma of building a simple web app or a sophisticated native app.
If you aren’t sure whether to build a hybrid app for your business or simply want to learn more about it, keep reading.
This post will cover the most influential and popular hybrid app development frameworks for the coming year.
What Is Hybrid App Development?
Before diving into development frameworks, let’s understand what a hybrid app is. A hybrid app is, in essence, a combination of web and native mobile apps. It contains platform-specific elements along with web app-building features. The result is greater flexibility and the ability to use code on multiple operating systems without making significant changes to the script.
A hybrid app is developed using a single codebase, operated on several platforms or operating systems.
Why Hybrid App Development Is Gaining Prominence
Here are a few criteria where hybrid apps are proving advantageous and the preferred choice among developers:
Code Reusability
A single codebase is written for all platforms, with minor changes depending on the platform where it is to be deployed. It also increases scalability, thanks to the combination of native and web app technologies.
Quicker Development
Writing the code only once significantly reduces the cost and time of developing a hybrid app. In contrast, native apps are platform-specific, i.e., they must be built separately for every platform.
Testing Is Also Faster
A single team can manage two platforms at once because a single code is reused across all the platforms. This simplifies, speeds up, and makes the testing process more efficient and manageable.
Fewer Expenses
A hybrid app costs less time and effort than a native app. Developers can use existing web development toolkits to create a better, more encompassing app. Moreover, its maintenance is far less complicated because only one codebase is required to build several versions of a single app. Applying patches and updates is also easier as a result.
Wider Audience Reach
Businesses choose hybrid apps when they require an app that can reach potential audiences on multiple platforms in less time.
Community Support
Hybrid app development frameworks are popular and have tremendous support. Due to this, development teams aren’t likely to remain stuck with an issue for long; they can access online forums and documentation for reference.
Top Hybrid App Development Frameworks For 2023
React Native
React Native was released by Facebook (now Meta) in 2015 and gained a massive number of contributors by 2018. Today, it is one of the most popular platforms, with a bustling community and a wide repository of resources.
This framework is used among several global brands, including Microsoft Office, Skype, Puma, Tesla, and Pinterest. It offers seamless cross-platform development, which also speeds up the work of existing native teams significantly. Its Hot Reload feature enables developers to save the time it would take to wait for builds to view, speeding up React Native app development.
Flutter
Flutter is also an extremely popular hybrid app framework that was created and officially launched by Google in 2018. The main reasons behind its popularity are its open-source nature and outstanding flexibility. The framework supports Dart language, further simplifying the bug identification and fixing process.
Other factors that encourage developers to choose Flutter app development are support for a wide range of widgets and the support of a huge community of developers. Top Flutter apps include eBay, Toyota, BMW, and Groupon.
Ionic
Ionic is also one of the most popular open-source front-end frameworks out there that enables developers to build hybrid apps as well as apps for mobile and web using the same codebase. It offers high performance with minimum DOM manipulation and a Command Line Interface (CLI) that saves time and effort in coding.
While it has a default UI, you can customize and add new features to the predefined CSS classes to suit your needs. Several additional factors contribute to the popularity of Ionic app development services, including a wide range of features and a large online community that promotes development best practices.
Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova is the hybrid, open-source version of PhoneGap, a framework that provides a wide collection of platform-specific native features in the form of plug-ins. This tool allows web developers to create native apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript content for several platforms.
While PhoneGap was discontinued in 2020, Cordova continues to have a large, active community due to the capabilities that create apps matching the speed and scalability demands in today’s mobile landscape.
Xamarin
Xamarin provides a platform to build well-performing Windows, iOS, and Android apps using .NET. Developers can share most of the app across these platforms, keeping their entire business logic in one language and working on native look, feel, and performance according to each platform.
They can also invoke Java, Objective-C, or C/C++ libraries for third-party code operability. Its robust Base Case Library and use of Visual Studio, a modern IDE, make it easier for a mobile app development company to build different types of apps. It significantly reduces app development time and costs.
Onsen
Onsen UI is an open-source UI framework that lets developers create native-like hybrid and Progressive Web apps. It offers ready-to-implement features that follow native design standards.
Since it’s framework-agnostic, developers don’t need a JavaScript framework to build apps. React, Vue, Angular, and many popular frameworks are all supported by binding packages in Onsen UI.
Sencha
The Sencha framework is most often used to create enterprise-grade applications. It also uses technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and ES6, allowing developers to build data-intensive mobile and web apps across platforms.
Sencha simplifies the process of optimizing, designing, and deploying applications. With it, you have access to a variety of tools and themes to improve productivity. Popular apps built using this framework include Associated Press, AT&T, and American Airlines.
Aurelia
Aurelia is a powerful open-source collection of Modern JavaScript modules that serve as a platform for building desktop, browser, and mobile apps. Creating any front-end experience imaginable is possible with its comprehensive set of capabilities and tools.
You can use its modules separately in any type of JavaScript project. Its flexibility, rich core, excellent rendering speed, and efficient memory utilization are why developers use it for various purposes. It combines uni-directional data flow and component encapsulation with data binding, providing safe and productive development via an efficient DOM-batching mechanism.
Ensure The Best Hybrid App Development For Your Project
The rise of hybrid apps reflects the fact that it provides brands with the convenience of launching one application across a variety of mobile devices and maximizing their reach while saving both time and money.
Hybrid app development has made it possible to code once and run apps on multiple platforms. Not only is building a hybrid app quicker and easier, but your brand will also be more accessible and sought-after if you offer your app on multiple platforms, such as Android and iOS.
AppsChopper is a hybrid app development company that can help you create this type of app for your business. Our team is well-versed with these, and additional frameworks; we know what tools to use that will enable you to bring a native app-like feel and ensure a more viable, time-efficient solution – without the hassle. Just ask our clients, who have left us an average of 4.9 rating on top platforms like Clutch.
