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

14

Options
Considered

269

User
Recs.

Nov 9, 2023

Last
Updated

13 Options Considered

Best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps	Price	Mobile targets	Dev platforms
75 Flutter	Free	Android and iOS	Windows, Mac and Linux
52 Xamarin	Free	Android, iOS, Windows Phone	-
52 React Native	-	-	-
-- Quasar Framework	-	Android, Blueberry, iOS, Windows Phone, Web	-
-- Ionic Framework	-	-	-

Flutter

Top Pro

Hot reload

Preview UI change instantly. See More

Top Con

Dart is unpopular and never gained serious community traction like Kotlin or Java

Mehran Abghari's Experience

I try React Native and Flutter both, But i understand Flutter more than React Native, And also Flutter developed by Google and more familiar with Mobile developing system I think! See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Android and iOS

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac and Linux

Desktop targets:announced Windows

Popular Language Bindings:Dart

Top Pro

Custom widgets

Flutter uses its own widgets implementation. Besides having good performance without any bridge, you don't need to fix specific device issues. It will look the same on all platforms. See More

Top Con

Google project loyalty

Vasudev Soni's Experience

I am completely in love with flutter. It is the best cross-platform app development platform I ever used. Now, I only use flutter to develop my apps. See More

Top Pro

Rapid prototyping

Top Con

Uses Dart language

Small community. See More

SkillfulTaraxippus's Experience

Awesome See More

Top Pro

Open source

Top Con

Lots of issues

Flutter has a lot of issues on GitHub. See More

WonderfulPersephone's Experience

I come from Xamarin, and started to use Flutter one year ago. I love everything about the framework since it offers quicker dev cycle and a greater overall environment compared to my previous experiences. See More

Top Pro

Write once, run anywhere

Top Con

Large APK size

Romain Rastel's Experience

Coming from Xamarin, this SDK was for me a revolution. I think it will be the next standard for developing cross platform apps. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Flutter has very good documentation that helps you to get started without any knowledge of Dart. See More

Robin Thomas's Experience

Easier to learn and even faster to implement... See More

Top Pro

Excellent performance

Flutter is built with C, C++, Dart, and Skia. Production apps run via natively compiled code. See More

EncouragingRheda's Experience

The best mobile developing experience, by far. It only needs time to prove the world this is the new meta. See More

Top Pro

Great developer tools debug/hotreload/analyser

PassionateMeskhenet's Experience

Fast to prototype See More

Top Pro

A single codebase for iOS AND Android

HelpfulGonggong's Experience

Amazing! It's the best framework multiplatform I've used so far. Friendly, well integrated with the IDE (IntelliJ), tons of possibilities and business logic driven. See More

Top Pro

Visual Studio Code support

Fully integrated development experience in Visual Studio Code. See More

Thomas Burkhart's Experience

Coming from Xamarin I was extremely happy how stable the tooling is. Productivity is extremely high because of hot reload. Learning the framework is easy and it is really fun to work with Flutter See More

Top Pro

Precise Garbage collection

Dart has a precise garbage collector as opposed to a conservative one. See More

Top Pro

Used by big companies

Such as Google, Alibaba. See More

Top Pro

The community

Strong community which is growing fast. See More

Top Pro

Fast

The developer's goal is to allow people to make apps running at 120 FPS. See More

Top Pro

Cool animations

Top Pro

Based on Dart language

Dart is a Java like language, easy to learn and startup fast for millions of Java developers. See More

Top Pro

Share Dart code between server, browser, mobile (Android, iOS)

Top Pro

Reactive programming

All views are built from immutable states which ensure easier debugging, less potential threading issues. See More

Top Pro

Dart

AOT-compiled, OOP. See More

Xamarin

Top Pro

Customizable to allow users to create native look and feel for each platform

Since Xamarin uses native UI components from each platform so it can be made to looked like a native iOS app. See More

Top Con

High app size

Depending on their type and complexity, Xamarin apps are typically larger than native ones (the latter might be half the size of a Xamarin app). A simple “hello, world” app for Android might take up to 16 MB, much of it being used by the associated libraries, content, Mono runtime, and Base Class Library (BCL) assemblies. See More

Joel Hernández's Experience

Highly recommended for newbies. It's capable of generating apps for Windows, Android and iOS. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Android, iOS, Windows Phone

Top Pro

Full support for hardware features like camera, accelerometer, gps

Top Con

Slow deployment time

You can imagine that it is frustrating if you spend 80 percent of your time waiting for Visual Studio compiling your project, sending it to your smartphone. See More

BrilliantLamashtu's Experience

Xamarin helps you build world class native apps, it’s been around the longest and will continue to innovate. See More

Top Pro

Free to use

Top Con

Very high installation weight

PositiveAlUzza's Experience

With Xamarin Forms and the lot of plugins in nuget, I develop my firt app that use camera, maps, firebase auth, firebase real time database, a complete app with more functionalities than Uber app in only two weeks, Is awesome. See More

Top Pro

Open source

The Xamarin SDK is free and open source and released under the MIT license. See More

Top Con

Hard to use third-party libraries

Because of issues with interoperability between C# and Java or Swift, it's a bit hard to integrate third-party libraries for iOS and Android with a Xamarin project. See More

UpbeatOrion's Experience

Top Pro

Backed by Microsoft

Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft and has been investing on the platform. See More

Top Con

Basic knowledge of native languages required

When using Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android to build mobile apps with truly native look and feel, you will still need to write a platform-specific layer of code. Thus, at least a basic knowledge of native technologies is required. This, however doesn’t apply to Xamarin.Forms. Xamarin.Forms has limited customization. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

.NET is evolving and Xamarin is evolving, read about it here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/microsoft-build-2020-xamarin/ See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Apps built with Xamarin can run natively on Android, iOS and Windows Mobile. Xamarin compiles the same C# or F# codebase to native code that runs on several platforms. See More

Top Con

No CodePush

CodePush only available for Cordova and React Native See More

Top Pro

Performance

For iOS C# is ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to ARM assembly language. For Windows C# is compiled to IL and executed by the built-in runtime. For Android C# is compiled to IL and packaged with MonoVM + JIT’ing. See More

Top Con

Slow to implement new features; must wait 1+ month to be able to access it

Top Pro

Xamarin Insights and Test Cloud increase user experience

Top Con

UI editing and creation is unstable

Top Pro

Support for Windows Phone

Top Con

Build time tends to be longer than Android Studio

Top Con

Expensive Xamarin University

Officially learning Xamarin costs $999/year per set . Free course is outdated. See More

React Native

Top Pro

Development productivity

With live reload compile times are from the past. See More

Top Con

No version 1 released yet

It is still in beta. See More

Shivani Mude's Experience

Just like any other technology, React Native too is blooming with the passage of time. From e-commerce to banking to retail, React Native has expanded its wings in all sectors. Whether you need a simple webpage for your startup or an app for your business, React Native can be an excellent choice for you. The fact that everyone is turning to React Native is because of it's numerous benefits. It not only allows for cross-platform development but also provides an opportunity to build native apps with JavaScript and native UI elements. Here is one site you can refer to hire react native app developers for your cross-platform app development. https://www.cronj.com/hire-react-native-app-developers.html 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 Con

Does not have framework

React Native does not have a framework for animations which means that developers need to create animations themselves or use a third-party library. See More

Anoop Krishnan's Experience

Top Pro

Open Source

No company dependency, community support and free to use. See More

Top Con

React Native only supports React which is getting old

React Native is only based on React which is getting old. An old tech developer can't take much breaking changes so it gets more patches. There is a limit, and React is too verbose and complex. Better alternatives available today. See More

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

Major modifications are implemented frequently

Modules must be updated regularly to keep pace with the rapid framework development. See More

Top Pro

Learn once, write everywhere

Knowledge of React can be used for developing web app components. 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

Performance

Performance – React Native has a revamped JavaScript engine that loads quickly and efficiently, thereby providing a better performance across the board. See More

Top Con

Painful upgrades

Upgrades to new versions not always smooth. See More

Top Pro

Design patterns per platform

Recognize and embrace platform differences. Allows the use of design patterns per platform, sharing code functionality without trying to mix them. See More

Top Con

Bundler errors

Half of the errors are from node_modules dependencies and disappear on reinstall. See More

Top Pro

React

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

Top Con

Basic issues

Time and time again, issues about basic things on github will be closed. Often, there are hacky workarounds posted that make it work somehow but obviously, that still means that react-native itself does not work as it is supposed to and the maintainers are not interested in changing that. See More

Top Pro

Expo allows you to run code over the network from everywhere

Thus, no Mac required to develop on iOS, unlike with other native options. See More

Top Con

"Native", yet it is difficult to achieve a native look & feel

Out of the box, the components don't look like anything you would see in a native app. The most popular UI component libraries provide a distinctly non-native look. One might find unpopular libraries for individual pieces here or there but the code is usually of questionable quality. See More

Top Pro

Live app inspection

Inspect UI elements directly from the device or emulator. See More

Top Con

Tightly coupled to expo

It is recommended throughout their docs. But it is relatively unstable and produces a huge bundle. See More

Top Pro

CodePush

Deploy mobile app updates directly to their users’ devices. See More

Top Con

No guarantees from FB about continuation of project

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

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

Top Pro

More predictable control of the state

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

Ionic Framework

Codename One

Top Pro

Easy to use an install works with all major Java IDE's

No special setup out of the box. See More

Top Con

Has pricing

Professional license cost $79/mo or $70/mo if paid annually. See More

DrHell's Experience

My experience was excellent. Fast, lightweight, easy to install (on NetBeans only installing a plugin was required). No emulation required, thanks to the simulators (themselves fast and lightweight). Well documented and with one of the main programmers (Shai) answering to questions on StackOverflow. And it is simply Java, it doesn't require to learn the n-th new language and paradigm. Comes with a whole bunch of already coded examples. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Google, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry

License:GPL with Classpath Exception, allows you to build proprietary applications

Languages:Java, Kotlin

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux

Top Pro

High performance

Top Con

Not ideal for heavy gaming

You can use it for casual gaming but currently not for big games. See More

Top Pro

Works with all IDEs

Works with NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Pretty much everyone is in this field but it's still a pro. See More

Top Pro

More portable than all of the above

True WORA and more supported platforms than most other tools. See More

Top Pro

Multi-platform development environments (via build server)

You can even use Linux desktops to build native iOS apps, no need for a Mac. See More

Top Pro

Has nicely working, lightweight simulators for a lot of possible phones/tablets

You can launch a simulator for a specific model, it will start in seconds and will work as fast as a html page. If you want to see the result that you will get on another model or a tablet, you can pick the desired one from the list. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight (specially regarding RAM) and fast

The RAM used is basically the same required for any other typical project in your IDE of choice. For example: using NetBeans, for a decently complex app it stays around 200-600MB, working perfectly within the bounds of 4GB RAM. The simulators run fast and are themselves lightweights. See More

Top Pro

Allows full access to native OS code without sacrificing overall portability

Top Pro

Highly customizable

By utilizing lightweight component architecture and the built in graphical designer and theming options you are able to customize a good looking app on any platform. See More

Top Pro

Supports Kotlin

Top Pro

Doesn't require a Mac, can work on iOS, Android & Linux

While still targeting iOS etc. See More

Top Pro

Attractive pricing

It is possible to build production grade apps even with the free version. Pricing is decent when compared to competitors like Xamarin. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't require to learn the n-th new language and/or paradigm

The whole framework consists only of well documented java classes. No new language to learn, no new paradigm for coding. If you are used to code in Java, that's all you need. If you are a C++, C#, or even JavaScript programmer, once that you grasp the basic of Java, you are good. See More

Top Pro

Native code can work with heavyweight peers e.g. Google Maps

Top Pro

Has paid enterprise support option

NativeScript

Top Pro

Instant access to native environment

No need to wait for bridges to new API developed by someone else. The concept behind NativeScript enables instant access to even brand new API or OS versions. See More

Top Con

Buggy Tooling

Unreliable build & run (never mind hot-reload); often found myself deleting the entire app from devices, aggressively deleting all build caches, then build & run and magically the exact same code base would behave again. See More

RealisticTriglav's Experience

Tooling - crashes or super long compile/hot-reload times, hot-reloads failing, full app delete, clean and rebuild required.... drove me nuts. Dropped it in favour of going native and re-writing the entire app 2x (iOS + Android). See More

Top Pro

Native UI

Native UI components to run cross-platform. See More

Top Con

Lack of performance

NS runs everything from a single thread, in JavaScript. This makes sense given how it accesses the low-level platform APIs, but also means that you can easily get lag and jitter when UI updates are blocked by other JS work. Source: https://medium.com/fuseblog/how-fuse-differs-from-react-native-and-nativescript-525344f02aaf See More

SupportiveSirona's Experience

easy to learn, can be use with plain js, In addition with Angular and TypeScript too. So you have not to be tied with any particular framework. See More

Top Pro

Open source

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

Top Con

No Fortune 500 companies using it

The real world use is important for selecting a framework. See More

Top Con

Few contributors

There are fewer open source contributors compared to other frameworks. See More

Top Con

Backend by a the relatively small company Telerik

Telerik is a small company, compared with Microsoft or Facebook. See More

Top Con

100% code share

NativeScript seems to be trying to get the holy grail of multi-platform development and this might lead to a lowest common denominator UI. ReactNative has specifically stated that they don’t see code reuse between the UI’s. This is what Xamarin has been saying from day one as well, re-use the business logic but hand code the UI for each platform. See More

Fuse

Top Pro

Compiles to native code

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

Top Con

Fuse Studio can use some work

Unlike Xcode or Android Studio, Fuse Studio has to be paired with a text editor or other IDE for code development. $125/month for access to Fuse Studio Pro seems steep for the limited UI editing capabilities. See More

jalakoo's Experience

Found Fuse very easy to setup and run. Fuse Studio is like an automated hot-reloading simulator that updates as soon as you've made any code level changes (as compared to having to hit a hotkey). Fuse Studio Pro is nice for editing UI elements quickly but not at all necessary. There are multiple IDE options to speed up development, I've been personally using VS Code. Of all the cross-platform development systems I've been testing out over the last few weeks, I've found coding UX and JS for Fuse to be both delightful and very concise. Recommend checking out their examples page at: https://examples.fusetools.com See More

Top Pro

Exportable UI

You can create part of or an entire UI experience in Fuse, then export a framework or aar file to be included in an Xcode or Android Studio project. 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

Top Pro

Can call native code

Java & Objective-C can be added to Foreign Code blocks for direct API access to any features not covered by the Fuse team. See More

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 Pro

Native performance

Appcelerator Titanium

Top Pro

Provides a close native experience

Through using Titanium's API and UI components similar to that of the platform's native UI, Titanium provides a close native experience. See More

Top Con

Most plugins are paid

Appcelerator Marketplace is meant to sell to developers 3rd party plugins and functionalities as well as code samples. Thus, people will prefer to sell you their plugins and samples instead of making them open source. This will increase costs of development. Source: https://marketplace.appcelerator.com/home See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Universal native API access trought JavaScript

Thanks to Hyperloop, Titanium makes it possible. See More

Top Con

Lack of capabilities

For example, there is no way to read QR codes natively. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40215208/qr-code-reader-on-appcelerator-titanium-alloy See More

Top Pro

Constantly updating and adding new modules

Many plugins that were paid are now modules that have been included. See More

Top Con

No ES6 support out of the box

The new JavaScript standard introduces a ton of improvements to the language structure that can't be used with this framework. See More

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