8 Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development

Mobile apps have endowed an accessibility ease to mobile phone users. They just need to use their fingers to pay bills, do shopping, book online tickets or perform any other activity. But smartphone revolution has brought numerous challenges in front of application developers as there has been a great paradigm shift in the field of development.

Now, we have UI’s optimized for fingers and not for mouse cursors. Moreover, there are bandwidth limitations that most portable personal devices possess. That’s why application developers have to beat all these challenges and come up with the finest solutions in the form of nicely functional mobile apps.

Different mobile platforms are available like iOS, Android and Windows, and the apps coded for each one of them employs different programming languages. An iOS app uses Objective-C, an Android app is coded with Java, while a Windows Phone application uses .NET.

It is necessary that developers should create cross-platform mobile apps so that it could save time and money required in developing apps for the individual platform. The best way to overcome the problem of developing different apps for different platforms is through JavaScript frameworks. With JavaScript frameworks, you can build an awesome cross-platform mobile app that can run on all mobile operating systems.

Anyone with a decent knowledge of programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can easily build a cross-platform mobile application. The biggest advantage of using JavaScript Frameworks – you can easily port and install your app on many different platforms. Many such JavaScript frameworks are available that can help you deploy cross-platform mobile apps.

1. PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a Cordova based open source framework developed by Adobe System. It is a commonly used JavaScript framework to develop mobile applications. It can be used to produce apps for all mobile OS platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, etc.

PhoneGap allows you to creates apps that can be available either offline or online. Developers have to use standard APIs to make their app functional on all major mobile operating systems. You can also convert your website into the app using PhoneGap. Simply upload the data contents on your website and PhoneGap will automatically convert it into various app files.

2. Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is an open, extendable mobile app development environment that helps the developer to create bold, beautiful and transformative applications. Apps created using this framework can run across different mobile devices as well operating systems like iOS, Android, Windows, etc.

Its core comprises of an open source SDK with more than 500 APIs, Alloy, an Apache-licensed, Titanium-based model–view–controller framework, and Titanium Studio, providing ready-to-use mobile backend. It is an award-winning environment that helps businesses to market 60% faster and attains a significant competitive advantage.

3. jQuery

It is a small, fast and feature-rich JavaScript library. It has easy-to-use API that works across multiple browsers and makes several tasks effortless like event handling, document transversal & manipulation, animation, and Ajax.

There are two ways to use jQuery – Local installation in which you can download jQuery library on your local machine. Second, CDN Based Version – You can include your jQuery library into your HTML code directly from CDN. You can also use jQuery Mobile framework to create custom themes and easily integrate them with third-party or other technologies.

4. Mobile Angular UI

Just like jQuery, Mobile Angular UI is another mobile UI framework that offers multiple development components like switches, absolute positioned top and bottom navbars that don’t bounce on scroll, overlays, sidebars, scrollable areas. With the help of Angular UI, you can bring your website to the mobile phones in the form of an app.

It’s true that HTML is a great way to declare static documents, but it wavers when someone tries to use it for declaring dynamic views in web apps. That’s why Angular JS is the best option that allows you to expand HTML vocabulary for your app.

This environment is extremely communicative, readable, and quick to develop. AngularJS is a toolset for building the framework appropriate for application development. It is fully expandable and works well with other libraries. Every aspect of this framework can be tailored or changed to suit your unique development workflow and characteristic requirements.

5. Sencha Touch

It is the leading HTML5 and JavaScript based cross-platform mobile & web application framework that is used to create universal mobile apps. Sencha Touch controls hardware acceleration techniques offering high-performance UI components for mobile devices.

Sencha Touch has more than 50 built-in UI components and native looking themes which can help you create impressive apps that work on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and more. Several features in Sencha Touch allow developers to build an application that responds to user actions right away.

These features include a novel and adaptive layout engine, fluid animations, and smooth scrolling. Some other components of Sencha Touch that make it the best JavaScript Framework includes high-performance, native-looking widgets, backend agnostic data package, and advanced mobile charting.

6. Meteor

Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript framework that is used for developing modern mobile applications. It is a free and open source application development platform that allows rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform code. There are some important technologies included in Meteor that are used for building connected-client reactive apps.

These technologies comprise of a build tool, curated set of packages from Node.js and general JavaScript community. You can develop an app in JavaScript language in all environments like a web browser, application server, and mobile device.

You will get the best part of tremendously active JavaScript community through Meteor in a careful and measured way. With Meteor, developers don’t need to push themselves too much into development as it offers full stack reactivity, giving them an outstanding UI.

7. Ionic

Ionic is an open source framework which is commonly used to develop hybrid mobile apps. This development framework provides tools and services that you can use for building native and progressive web apps with ease.

This framework is 100% free, and works and looks beautiful whenever it runs. It has more than 70 native device features like Bluetooth, HealthKit, TypeScript extensions, Finger Print Auth, and more with Cordova/PhoneGap plugins. It needs native wrapper so that it can be run on mobile devices. Developers can enjoy almost all functionalities found in native mobile development SDKs.

They can build their apps, customize them according to their device platform and deploy these apps through Cordova. Ionic includes mobile components, interactive paradigms, typography, and an extensible base theme.

8. React Native

It is an open source framework that helps developers reprocess the same code on the web and mobile. This platform doesn’t bother the engineers to build apps differently for Android and iOS.

Instead, they just need to reuse the code across each operating system. You can build your mobile apps using JavaScript only with React Native. It makes use of the same design as React, allowing you to create a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

So, it can be concluded that all the above-mentioned JavaScript Frameworks are the best in their own way. Your selection of framework should be based on the more number of features provided by a particular framework as compared to the others.

Your decision should be based on the functionality of the framework and you can employ that functionality in your mobile app development project. Hence, you must make a final selection of JavaScript framework as per your project needs.

Author Bio

Priya is a writing coach and blogger at impingesolutions.com an IT company provides web development, designing, digital marketing and mobile application development services!