Best Flutter Alternatives for App Development

Introduction

Flutter has gained massive popularity among the developers for building cross platform mobile applications. It is not only the one option for developing cross platform mobile applications but there are so many alternatives available. Flutter is a free and open source SDK of Google which provides support for app development across both Android as well as IOS platform. The benefit of using flutter is that we can develop applications for both android as well as IOS using the same codebase. The Flutter applications are being developed using Dart as a programming language. The apps developed in flutter are developed with the help of widgets. There are predefined set of widgets present in flutter to develop the applications. In this article we will take a look at Best alternatives which are available for app development.

There are 6 alternatives available for app development in the market which are as follows −

• React Native.

• Xamarin.

• Cordova.

• Ionic.

• PhoneGap.

• NativeScript.

React Native

React Native is a JavaScript based cross platform application development platform with which we can develop applications for both android as well as IOS. The React Native platform is an open source framework which was released in 2015. Due to its amazing features it is one of the mostly used alternative frameworks for mobile app development.

Benefits of using React Native.

• We can reuse the code which is being written for the different features which will ultimately help us to make the process more cost effective.

• As React Native is an open source platform there is a huge community of developers using it which provides great support for developers developing applications using React Native.

Xamarin

Xamarin is also a cross platform application developing framework which is used to develop applications for both android as well as IOS. The applications in Xamarin are developed using C# language.

Benefits of using Xamarin

• Xamarin offers huge collections of themes, charts and layouts which are used for building feature rich UI for applications.

• Xamarin also provides support to use its UI functionality to create UI for applications for different platforms.

• We can write the xamarin logic once and can deploy it across various platforms.

Cordova

Cordova is also one of the famous mobile app development frameworks in which we can develop applications for both iOS and android. Cordova uses html, css and javascript for developing applications. The applications generated by the Cordova framework are neither completely native nor web based. It has a combination of both native as well as web. Cordova applications have the APIs which access to the devices native APIs to perform some task.

Benefits of using Cordova

• As Cordova is a web based framework even a web developer can develop mobile applications using this framework.

• Cordova provides a command line interface for developing mobile applications.

• With the help of Cordova it becomes easy to manage images and media for various platforms.

Ionic

Ionic is a cross platform application development framework which is based on Angular and Cordova and it is similar to that of Flutter. Ionic Framework allows its users to utilize its components without any interface.

Benefits of using Ionic Framework

• We can create a cross platform application using only one language with the Ionic Framework.

• With the help of Ionic Framework we can develop application for android, IOS as well as Windows platform.

• With the help of ionic we can develop cross platform applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is another cross platform mobile application development platform which uses HTML, CSS and Javascript for developing mobile applications. It is an Adobe owned framework. If you are a web developer and looking for building mobile applications then PhoneGap will be a better option for you.

Benefits of using PhoneGapFramework.

• We can create cross platform mobile applications using the knowledge of Web Development such as HTML,CSS and Javascript.

NativeScript

NativeScript is another cross platform mobile application development platform with which we can develop mobile applications using Angular, Vue.js or Typescript. Native Script will provide us direct access to the native libraries of the application so that we can develop complex applications using this framework.

Benefits of using NativeScript Framework.

• NativeScript is a free and open source framework.

• It provides access to use native libraries with which we can easily develop complex applications.

Conclusion

In this article we have taken a look at different alternative frameworks which are available in market alternative to Flutter Development.