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What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?

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Oct 5, 2018

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Here’s the Deal

20 Options Considered

Best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript	Price	Mobile targets	License
88 Ionic Framework	-	–	–
85 React Native	-	–	–
-- Onsen UI	-	iOS, Android	Apache 20.0
-- NativeScript	-	–	–
-- Flutter	-	Android and iOS	Android and iOS

Ionic Framework

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Top Pro

Large, friendly and active community

Ionic Framework is currently one of the most popular frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. This has resulted in a very large community of active users who contribute to the community by writing tutorials and answering questions. See More

Top Con

Can be buggy

Ionic is still a young framework (version 1.0 was released in May 2015). There are still some quirks and bugs in the framework to work out, which you can see a list of on their Github. However Ionic is under active development and bugs are generally addressed quickly. See More

JoyfulVatanchu's Experience

Built on AngularJS Easy to learn See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Ionic is free to use and open source, resulting in an active and helpful community of users and contributors. See More

Top Pro

Built on AngularJS

Angular is a popular framework with plenty of learning resources available, making it simple to find additional resources on adding components. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to learn and to prototype

Top Pro

Focused on high performance

Ionic is focused on building high-performance apps, using hardware accelerated transitions, minimal DOM changes and no JQuery at all. Also, it accepts the use of others features, such as native scrolling, high-perfomance lists (collection-repeat), Crosswalk browsers, among others. See More

Top Pro

Cordova plugins

Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language. See More

React Native

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Top Pro

Allows you to develop native apps

React Native allows you to create native apps by generating native views with JavaScript instead of using a web wrapper. See More

Top Con

If core team doesn't use a certain feature, it's not developed

Whenever there's functionality you need that they don't use in their apps, it's not going to get developed by them, even if it's obvious it should be in the core. They always say to either submit a PR or create a separate module. See More

LivelyHorme's Experience

I live coding in react-native. Its very go through programming unlike ionic See More

Top Pro

Backed by Facebook

Facebook writes their mobile apps in React Native so the code base gets pretty thoroughly used in some highly demanding scenarios. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

React Native is not the most beginner-friendly framework for creating mobile apps with JavaScript. It requires that the developer know React, which is known to have a steep learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Large, supportive community

Despite being such a young framework (early 2015), the support for React Native grew quickly. There is a forum, active tag on Stackoverflow and many other ways to get help from the community. See More

Top Pro

More predictable control of the state

The one way data flow, makes it more predictable and easy to control. See More

Onsen UI

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Top Pro

Open source and free

Onsen UI is open source, and completely free to use. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

License:Apache 20.0

Top Pro

Can be used for web apps as well

Onsen UI is usable for classic web development as well as mobile. See More

Top Pro

Large selection of components

Onsen UI provides a wide selection of components that are ready to use out of the box and are easily customizable. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Onsen UI provides very clear, well-written and detailed documentation. It uses popular technologies that are likely already familiar to developers (such as jQuery and Angular). The framework is semantic and intuitive to use, making it quite fast to learn. See More

Top Pro

Supports React

React is the most trending front-end UI framework, naturally supporting that is a plus. See More

Flutter

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Top Pro

Native performance

Specs

Mobile targets:Android and iOS

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac and Linux

Top Pro

Cross platform UI

Top Pro

Material first

Cames with Material Design support. See More

Top Pro

Hot reloading

Top Pro

Fast prototyping

Top Pro

Works on all major platforms

You can run Flutter on Windows, Mac, and Linux. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Being open source, Flutter has a very large base of developers that work on solving various issues and improving the platform. Source code is available here. See More

Top Pro

No Javascript Bridge

Flutter is compiled to ARM native code without running over a Javascript Bridge. See More

Qt

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Top Pro

Global community

The community behind Qt is both massive and approachable. Digia (also owners) are joined by the likes of Intel, KDAB, ICS, Canonical and numerous others in sponsoring development, while communities such as KDE also contribute significantly. Forums are active, mailing lists are open, irc channels chatting, git repositories well managed. Answers to questions are usually minutes away. See More

smit patil's Experience

It not complete JavaScript but its the best Native JavaScript Framework available but need to know at least little bit C++ . U can implement Logic in JS or C++ . for UI u have to use qml See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Android, Tizen, IOS, Plasma Mobile, Blackbery

Platforms:X11, Wayland, MacOS, Windows, Android, IOS

Top Pro

Good documentation

Professional, thorough documentation with examples, available either in a web browser or in the stand-alone desktop client called assistant. See More

Quasar Framework

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Top Pro

All Platforms in One Go

Top Con

One Man Army

Even being a MIT licensed open source project, it's right now basically conducted by just one person. See More

Top Pro

Many Built-in Components

Top Con

Not 1.0 Yet

It's almost there (0.9.1) with new releases each month. Unfortunately the roadmap isn't clear enough. See More

Top Pro

Vue.js & ES6

Top Con

Vue.js & ES6

While many persons can agree with this item as Pro, on the other side there are still who don't gone to ES6. And, of course, it's mandatory to like Vue.js. See More

Top Pro

Android and iOS Themes

Full-featured CSS Framework with Material Design and iOS themes (for now), allowing write once and deploy as looking native. See More

Top Pro

Quasar Play App

Polymer

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Top Pro

Based on W3C's web components

Web Components are a collection of specifications released by W3C as a way to reduce the complexity of web apps by creating reusable components. Browser support is currently poor for web components, however Polymer is developed to make web components compatible with modern browsers. See More

Top Con

Slow performance in mobile

Since most mobile web browsers don't have a very powerful JS engine, Polymer can be a little slow for mobile devices. See More

Specs

v1.0 GZipped size:53K

v2.0 GZipped size (Chrome):10K

v2.0 GZipped size (Edge):36K

v2.0 GZipped size (Firefox):32K

Top Pro

Component based

Polymer apps are component based. You have to break down the layout of your UI into components, which makes it easier to understand how every part of the application works and how they relate with each other. This way it's also easier to maintain the application. See More

Top Con

Compatible with only some of the latest browsers

Polymer is still very much in development and it yet doesn't support some older browsers. It doesn't even support IE 10. See More

Top Con

No server side rendering

Polymer does not support server-side rendering. This results in higher loading times, more HTTP requests and it's not very SEO friendly, since search engines have no way of indexing a page if it's not rendered in the server. See More

Fuse

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Top Pro

Compiles to native platform code

A key difference is that Fuse uses JS exclusively for app logic while producing native code for everything else, including population and manipulation of the UI. See More

Top Con

Little reuse of web knowledge

Fuse doesn't support Angular or React so there is little reuse of existing web tech knowledge. The team have said they are exploring Angular 2 and then maybe React though. See More

FerventAngitia's Experience

Building a native app very fast with existing HTML & JavaScript knowledge See More

Top Pro

Native performance

Top Pro

OpenGL UI

With the option to use OpenGL based UI components, Fuse is the only of the three platforms that offer a reliable “write once, run everywhere” approach where designers can control responsive layout, look and feel down to points, pixels and percentages, keyframes and easing curves. See More

jQuery Mobile

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Top Con

Does not create a native feel

jQuery UI does not focus too much on giving that "native" feel and look in Android and iOS apps. See More

Top Pro

Great cross-platform compatibility

jQuery Mobile works on any platform that supports HTML5. Cross-compatibility is a big focus for jQuery mobile, which includes developing with a progressive enhancement approach to support older browsers. See More

Top Con

Poor performance across devices

JQuery does a lot of DOM manipulation, overloading CPU, producing poor apps performance, and laggy transitions. See More

Top Pro

Popular option with a large community

As with most of the jQuery suite, jQuery Mobile has a large and active community of users and contributors. This makes it easy to find 3rd party tutorials, code samples, help/advice and plugins. See More

Top Con

Dull default UI

jQuery Mobile provides only one UI (with different color options), so without a lot of customization, apps made with the framework tend to look quite similar. However, it's easily customizable with CSS. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to learn/use

jQuery is likely familiar to JavaScript developers, which shortens then time needed for learning jQuery Mobile. See More

Mobile Angular UI

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Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Pro

Supports Twitter Bootstrap

V-Play

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Top Con

Expensive monthly fee

Top Pro

Easy to learn

V-Play is among the easiest cross-platform tools to use according to a survey done by research2guidance. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS; Android; Symbian

License:Proprietary

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

Top Con

Small community

V-Play is young and has a fairly small, inactive community. There is not much activity on their forum, and currently no 3rd party learning resources. See More

Top Pro

In-game level editor

With the Level Editor components, you can let your players share their levels with the whole game community which is cool because you don't need to create new levels on your own, but the community helps you with it. There are other community features like rewards for good level creators that helps getting more downloads. See More

Top Pro

Frequent Updates

Every 2-4 weeks updates provide new features and fixes based on what users want the most. See More

Top Pro

Mature cross platform IDE

Qt-Creator IDE with Code Completion, Debugging and Profiling, integrated Quick Help, Version Control and more. See More

Top Pro

Native performance

You write the logic in JavaScript, however components of the engine important to performance are implemented in C++. See More

Top Pro

V-Play game network

Leaderboards, Achievements, Challenges are available across platform, even on Desktop. You can also use Cloud Syncinc of your game data that makes it easy to start a game for example on iPhone and then continue on a Nexus Tablet or the other way around. It is also convenient because sharing to all kind of game services & networks like Facebook & Game Center is possible with a single API call. Custom hosting of Game Network servers is also possible if you want to keep the player data. See More

Top Pro

Social services and monetization

In-app purchases, game and social network integration (such as Game Center and Facebook), ads (with Chartboost and AdMob) and analytics (such as Flurry) are all available across platforms. See More

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