Choosing the right mobile application framework for your project.
Tags: android, ios, mobile, programming
Published: 2021-03-04 12:19:47

Choosing the best mobile application framework, that's the worst nightmare when it comes to choosing the right platform as there are a lot of options available for the mobile application framework. The plausibility of you choosing and learning the right framework is very less as for most of the developers "choosing a Mobile Development Framework is very difficult".Leaving all the difficulty n choosing the option there is a lot of considerations for the framework that will impact productivity, the factors are:
1. __Time to market:__
How is the time that we spend to get the application for the market and is it marketable and also selling those apps and debugging like will take a lot of time for the development and the deployment also? Thus we have to keep a lot of factors into consideration when it comes to time for the market. (As a developer you aim to get the best application and make your application stay marketable).

2. __Development Cost:__
What is our current development cost, maintenance cost, do we have the revenue to hire folks, and also think do we have to need more engineers as the requirements start to increase as a company(cause you also should see paying the bills and also learn to make profits), thus you should stay marketable with the technology that you have developed.

3.__App performance:__
What features do we need and what features do we need for getting the features available and what are the performance parameters for the development of the application.

4. __Risks in using the 3rd party tools__
As the platform might be only less but there are software optimizations that differ, API calls that differ, and also maybe what if the application doesn't have a secure environment, what if the application becomes incompatible with some devices, what if the code has no compatibility with the OS of the device.

so __let's discuss the first-party native platforms.__
##First Party Applications
Apple who makes ios gives Xcode as an SDK for the native development, which can be used to design the application using the swift and the C# programming language.
One advantage of this platform is we get a native UI/UX so that you don't have to optimize the frameworks that are required for the device, the only downside is a little slower as the development stage we have to create the same application twice with two different code bases and with the two different engineers who are proficient in Android and ios. This increases the development and maintenance cost and slows down the time to market.
but whenever the new updates and the frameworks are available the updates will be available on the same day in both SDK, we need not have to worry about fall back or whether we will be having support for these toolsets.

###Progressive Web Application Framework.
There are a lot of toolsets like Microsoft Blazor, Native Script, Angular JS, React, Ionic, these are the frameworks that are easily available that are useful in getting the web apps deployed much faster.
These toolsets have a downfall as you are recreating those UI/UX which is not available as these are the Frameworks/toolsets that focus on the web application that is running on a browser, here you don't need to develop the separate code base for the Android and the ios as they are platform-independent. (obviously, the web applications are platform-independent)
This downfall has all the applications to be built, we need to rewrite the UI/UX and thus maintenance is not that expensive. In the Native application, we get access to the optimized code(framework) and the tuned performance of the software which is not available in the progressive web application(this is fairly optimized for speed like you can say Nativ platform can access the applications in a lesser time than the Progressive web Application)
####Progressive web applications feature access
there are some features that a Web Application can access but there is some feature where they cant access thus for most of the applications they cant access the hardware and control API doesn't support a Web framework to access those features through the application. The list of those features is given below.
#####One big benefit is that you can install a Web Application using a website.
* Doesn't require App Store.
* Install locally to the device.
* Runs as an installed application.
_(Basically You can navigate to the website, add to the home screen they will start to work as a Native application, this ensure that user get a very good update from the Web-based code base for engineering the application and getting you dates as early as possible and giving a feel of using a native application)_

this is for the Progressive Web Applications ut now we will discuss Cross-Platform Native Apps. These are the platform where we can write the code in one framework and deploy it on both the ios and Android platforms.
####Xmarin:
This is a cross-platform native solution from Microsoft we build applications using .NET, c#, and F#on visual Studio thus the features Updates released through the Visual Studio and the other features are given below(in the image).

####React Native
A Facebook cross-platform native framework similar to Xmarin gives access to every single Android and ios API, so UI and UX are native which is programmed using javascript, Updates are released through NPM and the other features are given below(in the image).

####Flutter
A Google cross-platform native framework which has its own style of the UI/UX design where it doesn't use the UI/UX API provided by the Android and ios, it just uses widgets to program the UI/UX, programmed using Dart programing language(created by Google) updates released for Flutter is through NPM, this programing language is not that many developers are familiar with it but this programing language is similar to C# and java and thus updating to Dart is very easy. This open-source framework has been a change in the process in which the development of the application used to happen in the native development space and the other features are given below(in the image).

##Scenario for the Development(a general scenario)
###Scenario One:
Let's say we have to develop a simple application for a company that has a website created using AngularJS, we have a good team of web developers and the application that we are developing doesn't require many features. Thus for this situation, it is easy to develop progressive web applications as we have a codebase of Javascript thus this solution will be a good choice.
Here in this application, we need not have to have huge funding some engineering for the same code base will give us a very great solution for the optimized "native-like" application.

###Scenario Two:
A company that aims in building an application that is very critical in terms of graphics, memory a very intense application that requires more optimizations and tuning of the performance(like Augmented Reality Apps,3D games, etc). These are the kind of companies that have venture capital funding, Weary of 3rd party Frameworks, and are risk-averse thus a native development platform/toolset is useful as they will get the best-tuned application for their application thus they are not ready to take the risk of using the third party frameworks.

In conclusion, which application is to be chosen, we have to choose the framework that works best fr your team as every team is going to have different scenarios and different capabilities as the routine of the development might also change since many companies which used to develop in Android changed to Flutter , this decision of which framework to use is only making a big deal as long as we understand the difference in the working of the native, progressive web application, Cross-platform native we can ensure that we use the best mobile framework for our problem statement and also for the team.