The use of mobile application technologies has rocketed over the last few years. With the ever-growing advent of modern smartphones, people are using apps to order their favorite food, book tickets and hotels, make banking transactions, listen to music and etc more than before. And today, mobile application technologies have become an inseparable part of our lives.
Every business that wants to enhance its branding and retain its customers needs a user-friendly mobile app to sell its products, extend assistance, offer service, or share information. But with millions of smartphone apps already on the Google PlayStore and the Apple App Store, it’s not easy for a new app to get users’ attention. Therefore, in addition to identifying how your mobile application will function or what resources you’ll require, it’s essential to find out which mobile development platforms or technology will best serve your needs.
In this article, we review the most popular mobile app development approaches and the advanced technology stacks you can use to implement your applications. These mobile application technologies can be different depending on what kinds of mobile apps you want to develop: native apps, cross-platform apps, or hybrid apps.
Native Mobile Application Development
Building native apps for multiple platforms such as Android and iOS requires you to use separate mobile app development technologies for each.
Mobile Application Technologies Stack for Android Applications
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Programming Languages: Java, Kotlin
Java is rather an old language. It’s a reputable programming language with extensive open-source tools and libraries. Kotlin is inherently lightweight and clean. It was also officially supported by Google in 2017. Kotlin has become a more stable and congruous development option for Android Studio. It was specifically designed to improve existing Java models by offering solutions to API design deficiencies.
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Toolkit: Android Studio and Android developer tools
Code editing, debugging, performance tooling, a flexible build system, and an instant build/deploy system is provided by Android Studio. It lets you focus on building unique and high-quality apps. Android Developer Tools not only provides full support for Android app development but also offers Android-specific coding support. It allows developers to use various on-device debugging tools, a graphical UI builder, emulators, and fully scriptable test automation support.
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SDK: Android SDK
Developers must download and install each version of SDK for a particular phone to write programs with the latest features. All components can be downloaded separately.
Technology Stack for iOS Applications
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Programming Languages: Objective-C, Swift
Objective-C is rather an old language. It’s a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime environment. Apple created Swift in 2014 in an attempt to make life easier for developers. Swift is more functional, provides code that’s less error-prone because of its inline support for manipulating text strings and data, and contains dynamic libraries that are directly uploaded to memory.
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Toolkit: Apple Xcode
If you decide to use Swift for your iOS app development, you will require Apple Xcode as the toolkit for developing your native app. This full-featured development environment allows you to develop mobile apps and desktop applications. Xcode supports Git repositories, a graphical editor for creating user interfaces, instrumentation and debugging tools, and integrated documentation.
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SDK: iOS SDK
The iOS SDK provides an application programming interface (API) that serves as a link between the software applications and the platform on which they are running. The iPhone SDK provides tools for Apple’s touchscreen interface and for its proprietary iOS operating system which is used to run Apple’s iPhones as well as Apple’s other mobile devices such as the iPad.
Cross-Platform Application Development
A cross-platform approach allows developers to use a single code for different platforms, so mobile apps can run on various platforms simultaneously.
Technology Stack forCross-Platform Applications
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Frameworks:
React Native:
React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing mobile apps that look and sound native to both iOS and Android. React Native uses the same simple UI building blocks as standard iOS and Android apps. React Native provides a novel, radical, and highly functional approach to designing user interfaces. With React Native, your application logic is written and running in JavaScript, while your application UI is fully native. Instagram and Skype are examples of such apps.
Xamarin:
Xamarin is one of the top mobile app development frameworks and it is .Net based. It uses C# as the main language for cross-platform development. Xamarin offers a development ecosystem with back-end, API, components, and etc. With the help of Xamarin, developers can build Android, iOS, and even Windows apps.
Hybrid Application Development
Hybrid development makes use of standard web technologies and tools like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Such apps function like websites, fundamentally, somewhere between an app and a page rendered in a browser.
Technology Stack for Hybrid Applications
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Frameworks:
Ionic:
Ionic is an AngularJS-based framework, which helps you to build interactive hybrid and Progressive Web Applications along with cross-platform applications. You can continuously build applications when working in Ionic and ship them to deployable locations.
Cordova/PhoneGap:
Apache Cordova is an open-source framework for running HTML/JavaScript-based applications inside a special native container on a mobile device. It has access to features such as the camera, notifications, etc. Since PhoneGap supports numerous frameworks and libraries including jQuery, AngularJS, and Knockout.js, developers don’t have to rely only on HTML and CSS to build the user interface.
Conclusion Mobile Application Technologies
Mobile development trends have witnessed a significant paradigm shift in terms of code, script, frameworks, integration, development method, and deployment. While we are getting into native, cross-platform, and hybrid applications, technologies like IoT, AI, ML, Blockchain are adapted to give the smartest, secure, and better user experience. It will be interesting to see how hybrid our applications will become with such fast-growing technology adoption.
Aminsoft team has a decade-long experience in custom mobile applications technologies development. No matter which technology you want to use, we have top-notch experts in different fields assisting you to choose the best one according to your kind of business. Just contact us. We will be by your side all the way.