The need for mobile apps has increased dramatically as their number too. The number of mobile devices in use has passed the first billion more than a year ago and it is still increasing. As mobile use is closing the gap with computer use, the gap of development skills is increasing. Mobile platforms are huge with lot of possibilities and not so easy learning curves. Apple iOS supports Objective-C, C, C++, or Swift programming languages, on the other side, Android supports Java programming language. If you want to target these platforms, you have to be proficient in at least two programming languages, which is not very easy. In addition to that, publishing to both platforms requires you to develop and maintain the very same application twice. Cross platform development of hybrid webview applications could be your saviour if your requirements are not graphic or resource intensive. With the performance of the mobile devices of our time, we can easily run mobile web applications packed as native apps with a performance close to native apps (games and resource intensive apps make an exception here). But how do we build such an app?
The answer is, by leveraging our existing web development skills with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript and packaging it to a native app. But as we make our mind to use these technologies, we still have many other choices to make. The next one is what framework do we want to use. You can choose to make your UI by yourself, but chances are you will make a not so good feeling UI, or you will use quite a good time with it, so going with a framework is a wise choice here. Some of the choices are:
and this is not the end of the list. There are more choices.
Some of these frameworks offer only a mobile friendly User Interface (UI), and some have UI and packaging features. UI only frameworks are jQuery mobile, AngularJS and Bootstrap combination, Ionic and AngularJS, Kendo UI, and intel XDK. If you choose one of these, you can package them to a native mobile app using Apache Cordova or Adobe Phonegap Build. Appcelerator Titanium and Sencha Touch offer their own tools of packaging.
How do you make your choice? I would say your experience and required time to market are most important factors here. Perhaps jQuery mobile can give you the fastest way to put the app together, however, I must say it does not give you a very native user experience. Kendo UI has a good set of UI components but it comes at a price. So, in my opinion. there is no clear line here. The project requirements and available skillset influence the choice.
From my personal experience, I have developed few apps using jQuery mobile, Sencha Touch, and AngularJS with Bootstrap. The latter is my favourite choice, but I am looking forward to expand my horizon and try other frameworks as well. Let’s see what the future brings.
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