Most Popular Android App Development Frameworks for Mobile Apps

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Audacity IT Solutions LTD.
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The aim of frameworks is to make Mobile Development as simple as possible.

Most Popular Android App Development Frameworks for Mobile Apps

The trend of building mobile apps has accelerated in the past couple of years because people have realised that apps are a good way to connect with customers. According to Statista reports, the Google Play Store had more than 2 million apps for download in the third quarter of 2018.

The most straightforward way of developing Android mobile app is to download Android Studio. It is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that has the necessary packages (bundled under the name Android SDK) to help you create the app. The one thing to remember is that Android Studio is just an environment that supports mobile app development. You must have programming knowledge to write the necessary codes for developing the app.

Java is the official Android app language which is supported by Google most extensively. Java is used to develop the backend whereas XML is used to design the layout of any Android app. So ideally, you should know Java and XML to create an android app using Android Studio.

If you are more comfortable with C#, C++, C or even BASIC, you can use different SDKs (Software Development Kits) like Android Native Development Kit in combination with Android Studio.

The Best Android App Development Frameworks

Kotlin

The important point in favour of Kotlin is its interoperability with Java. As Kotlin also uses Java Virtual Machine, codes in Kotlin can easily be run as Java code. This is making Kotlin popular even among die-hard Java fans.

The learning curve for Java is steep, so Kotlin was introduced as the second official Android language 2 years ago. It has an easier entry barrier in terms of coding skills as compared to Java. Being a new language, community support is very less, but growing at a fast rate.

Even if Kotlin is better than Java in terms of lesser time and effort required to learn it, learning new programming languages is no joke. To help app enthusiasts develop Android mobile apps even if they do not know Java so well, many frameworks are available to enable faster development of Android mobile apps. The best part is that most of these frameworks work for other mobile operating systems as well.

Xamarin

It provides mobile app developers with a complete set of C# code base to develop native apps for not only Android but other mobile operating systems too.

One of the best Android app development frameworks which is already used by more than 1.5 million users globally, Xamarin is a godsend for C# enthusiasts who want to develop android apps without having to dive into Java. Xamarin for Visual Studio is also used extensively by Android mobile app developers to create native apps using .NET code base.

React Native

React Native is an open source version of Facebook’s JavaScript framework to develop native mobile apps. It has been used by many Fortune 500 companies like Instagram, Tesla, and Walmart to create mobile apps. As the React Native’s basic building blocks are the same as those of native apps, one cannot distinguish between apps built using Java and React Native.

Ionic

A free and open source app development framework, Ionic is licensed under the MIT License. This gives an open indication that it will remain free always. Its website says that you can build “progressive web and native mobile apps” using the Ionic framework. The framework is completely cross-platform, so you can easily develop mobile apps for Android and then transfer it to other platforms when required.

Cordova

Mobile apps are a natural extension to web apps. Taking this as the base, a free and open source mobile development framework using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was developed by the people behind Apache. Called Cordova, this mobile app development framework allows the developers to create multi-platform mobile apps using a single code base. The app is able to access native device APIs too, making it difficult to know if the app has been developed using native languages or not.