Working with hybrid frameworks simplifies life for developers because they can write code once and construct mobile applications that operate on several platforms with little effort. The program will be available on Android and iOS, and the code may be repurposed for progressive online applications and even desktop applications. This guide will look at the top 10 hybrid frameworks for building outstanding hybrid mobile apps.
Hybrid Frameworks List
This section identifies ten great hybrid frameworks for developing hybrid apps:
- React Native
- Ionic Framework
- NativeScript
- Quasar
- Kendo UI
- Framework7
- Aurelia
- Onsen UI
- Ext JS
- Axway Appcelerator
Now it’s time to look at the top 10 hybrid frameworks.
1. React Native
React Native allows you to create mobile apps using only JavaScript. It shares the same concept as React, allowing you to develop a complex mobile UI with declarative components.
This framework does not allow you to create a “mobile web app,” an “HTML5 app,” or a “hybrid app.” You create a true mobile app that is indistinguishable from one made using Objective-C or Java. React Native employs the same fundamental UI building blocks as traditional iOS and Android applications. You simply put those building elements together using JavaScript and React.
2. Ionic Framework
The Ionic Framework is a full-featured open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development. It offers tools and services for creating hybrid mobile apps using Web technologies such as CSS, HTML5, and Sass.
Apps can be created using these Web technologies and then distributed through native app stores to be installed on devices using Cordova.
This framework is completely free and open-source. It is licensed by MIT and supported by a large global community. They support over 120 native device functionalities, including Bluetooth, HealthKit, Fingerprint Auth, and others, through Cordova and PhoneGap plugins and TypeScript extensions.
You can use their CLI to create, build, test, and deploy Ionic apps across all platforms. The framework includes the Ionicons icon pack, which contains hundreds of the most common app icons. You may utilize Live Reload to develop your apps because compiling and deploying your app at each stage of development is for amateurs. More useful features include deep linking, AoT compilation, and a custom animation API.
Ionic is framework-agnostic, with official support for React, Preact, Angular, Vue, and Web Components.
3. Native Script
NativeScript apps, originally developed by Progress, are constructed with JavaScript or any language that translates to JavaScript, such as TypeScript.
This hybrid mobile app framework is deeply integrated with the latest Angular versions, and it includes full-stack features like Angular CLI integration, router support, and code generation. It offers a connection with Vue via a community-developed plugin, allowing you to use the Vue CLI, Vuex, and other nice Vue.js features.
4. Quasar
The Quasar Framework is driven by Vue.js, allowing developers to write code once and deploy it as a website (SPA, PWA, SSR), mobile app (iOS, Android), and desktop application (using Electron), all from a single code base.
Out of the box, Quasar provides cutting-edge UI that adheres to Google Material standards. It additionally provides, while maintaining a little performance overhead:
- HTML/CSS/JS minification
- Cache busting
- Tree shaking
- Source mapping
- Code-splitting and lazy loading
- ES6 transpiling
- Linting code
- Accessibility features
The authors of this hybrid mobile app framework say that it is “the most performance-focused framework.”
Additional functionalities, such as hot-reloading, are available to developers via the Quasar CLI. One of the framework’s most notable features is its extensive documentation and active community.
It’s worth noting that Quasar is completely free, open-source, and MIT-licensed.
5. Kendo UI
Kendo UI offers a large library of JavaScript UI components, as well as frameworks for jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue, to help you build hybrid mobile apps.
Powered by Progress Telerik (the same parent company as NativeScript). It includes dozens of ready-to-use widgets for jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.
Kendo UI is designed to help development teams quickly create high-performance hybrid mobile apps with exceptional performance.
This hybrid app framework is open source, although it is geared toward enterprise customers. There are no free versions available. One of Kendo UI’s main selling points is that it provides world-class support. It also guarantees that each component has been tested through its stringent QA procedure.
Among the most notable Kendo UI clients are HP, NASA, and over 140,000 other firms throughout the world. If you want an enterprise-grade solution with dedicated support, this hybrid app development platform is worth considering.
6. Framework7
Framework7 is a free and open-source mobile HTML framework for creating hybrid mobile apps, web apps, and progressive web apps (PWAs) that have a native appearance and feel. It can also be used with other tools, such as Electron and NW.js, to create native desktop programs.
This hybrid app framework can be an invaluable prototyping tool, allowing you to display working app prototypes as soon as feasible. It focuses on iOS and Google Material design to provide the best experience and simplicity.
Framework7 provides certain important features, including:
- Native scrolling
- Library-agnostic
- Pages transition animation
- Multiple views support
- Hardware-accelerated animations via CSS3
- Route pages utilizing XHR, caching, browser history, and preloading
7. Aurelia
Aurelia defines itself as a “collection of modern JavaScript modules that, when used together, function as a powerful platform for building browser, desktop, and mobile applications.” As a result, any of Aurelia’s modules can be used individually in any JavaScript or Node.js project.
Aurelia, with its emphasis on clean yet powerful code, is intended specifically for those who prefer vanilla JavaScript or TypeScript. They even go so far as to say that they are “the only framework that lets you build components with plain, vanilla JavaScript/TypeScript”.
Still, because it strictly adheres to web standards, it is easily integrated with any framework or library available. Aurelia’s most powerful modules include metadata, dependency injection, binding, templating, and routing.
Its ecosystem includes plugins for state management, internationalization, and validation, as well as tools such as a command-line interface, Chrome debugger, and Visual Studio Code plugin.
Because Aurelia is built on a high-performance reactive architecture, it can batch DOM updates more quickly than virtual-DOM-based frameworks. This hybrid mobile app framework is completely free to use, open source, and licensed under the MIT license.
8. Onsen UI
Since its introduction in 2013, Onsen UI has seen rapid popularity. It is an open-source framework released under the Apache v2 license.
Onsen UI is a framework-agnostic UI component. You can choose and switch between the frameworks: AngularJS, Angular, React, and Vue.js, or go pure JavaScript to construct your hybrid apps.
The framework architecture is composed of three layers:
- CSS components
- Web components
- Framework bindings
- It also includes a huge number of ready-to-use, responsive, and out-of-the-box components.
This framework is easy to use, versatile, has semantic markup components, and is free for business projects.
9. ExtJS
Ext JS is an enterprise-grade solution for creating cross-platform, end-to-end mobile web apps using HTML5 and JavaScript. It is best suited for developing data-intensive, cross-platform web and mobile apps.
This hybrid mobile app framework isn’t ashamed to claim to be “The Best JavaScript Framework In The World”. In reality, among the 10,000 firms that use the framework are Apple, Adobe, Cisco, Nvidia, and many other worldwide enterprises.
Individual developers and freelancers will benefit from Ionic, Onsen UI, or Framework7; nevertheless, for enterprise apps, Ext JS takes the lead.
ExtJS outperforms its competition by delivering a native appearance and feel across all platforms it supports. It enables the development of high-performance hybrid mobile apps with a near-native experience, as well as the inclusion of ready-to-use widgets with a native appearance and feel for all major platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.
The framework also has a drag-and-drop HTML5 visual application builder with an abundance of ready-to-use templates. It includes support for both Angular and React.
10. Axway Appcelerator
Appcelerator (sometimes called Appcelerator Titanium) is a JavaScript-based hybrid app framework. It is cross-platform and fully supports Android and iOS. Finally, the produced code combines native and JavaScript to boost performance for hybrid mobile app development. It has integrations available for Angular and Vue.
Appcelerator is a useful tool for developing hybrid mobile applications. Titanium Studio must be downloaded before using Appcelerator.
The Titanium SDK contains a variety of mobile platform APIs and cloud services for use as an app backend. It has platform-independent APIs, which make it easier to access phone hardware.
Appcelerator leverages Hyperloop to combine Titanium’s cross-platform capability with direct access to any native API via JavaScript. The framework offers free and premium plans.
Ionic Framework: Create Mobile Experiences with the Web
Ionic offers a suite of tools for creating native iOS and Android applications, as well as mobile-ready Progressive Web Apps, while leveraging common web libraries, frameworks, and languages.
Ionic Capacitor is a cross-platform native bridge that can turn any web project into a native iOS or Android app. Capacitor offers straightforward access to common device features using basic JavaScript, with complete access to the native operating system as needed.
Capacitor is enhanced by the Ionic Framework, which includes a comprehensive collection of mobile-optimized UI components as well as mobile routing, navigation, gestures, and animations. The Ionic Framework works with particular JavaScript frameworks such as React, Angular, and Vue. If you’ve used any of these JS frameworks before, you’ll feel right at home.
Ionic Portals enable the development of mobile micro-frontends that can be deployed to any existing native mobile application, including those created using Swift, Kotlin, React Native, and others. Enterprises generally utilize portals to expand development by allowing many teams to build, test, and ship simultaneously, or to deploy a single microapp across several applications.
Conclusion
Hybrid app development has risen tremendously in recent years. It’s no wonder that many development teams choose hybrid mobile apps over native apps—they allow for faster development, easier prototyping, and a significantly higher ROI.
If you plan to develop a mobile application, using hybrid frameworks can also make it easier to build apps for the web and desktop, allowing you to reach more customers.
And, thanks to developments in the JavaScript ecosystem and each of the hybrid mobile app frameworks listed below, hybrid mobile apps are now more similar to native apps than ever before, both in terms of overall appearance and performance.