9 Best JavaScript Mobile App Development Frameworks

Technically, mobile apps on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone are developed using different programming languages. iOS apps use Objective-C, Android apps use Java, and Windows Phone apps use .NET. With the improvement of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML knowledge and skills, I believe you can also build an awesome mobile app. In this blog, we will introduce some excellent JavaScript mobile application development frameworks.

When it comes to web development, we have to talk about JavaScript, which is a very promising programming language. But in the foreseeable future, can JavaScript also bring the same impact to mobile app development? Let's find out. Here are the 9 best JavaScript mobile application development frameworks that we have researched on ValueCoders.

PhoneGap/Cordova

PhoneGap (from Apache Cordova) is a software development framework that allows you to quickly develop hybrid mobile applications using existing web development technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Therefore, it is not a pure JavaScript framework to be precise. Now let's take a look at PhoneGap.

PhoneGap is the intermediary between web application code and mobile system API. The following diagram can help you understand it:

Source: phonegap.com

With the help of PhoneGap, you can generate APIs for mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS using the same code you originally wrote in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

In addition to PhoneGap, there are other frameworks that can help you convert JavaScript files into mobile APIs, such as Xamarin, Ionic, Corona.

Related reading: Xamarin or Ionic: Which one to choose?

Titanium

Appcelerator's Titanium is an open source application development platform that allows you to create native applications (mobile and desktop applications) using web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Titanium Mobile SDK is one of the most popular cross-platform mobile development solutions used today, with more than 916,109 mobile developers and 460,587,474 devices using Accelerator-driven applications.

This is the architecture diagram of Titanium work:

jQuery Mobile

[[181652]]

jQuery Mobile framework takes "write less, do more" as the next version of the concept. This is one of the most advanced mobile JavaScript frameworks that can be used to create applications or websites that are friendly to mobile devices.

jQuery Mobile provides a large number of user interfaces to support compatibility with modern platforms, such as Android, iOS, and even very early Opera Mini, Nokia Symbian, etc. You can integrate jQuery Web applications in PhoneGap to make them interactive iOS or Android applications.

Sencha Ext JS

Ext JS (also known as Sencha Touch — they merged into Ext JS 6.0 in March 2015) is said to be the only solution framework that allows developers to quickly create excellent mobile applications that can run on Android, iOS, Kindle Fire or some other platforms. It is equipped with a large number of creative and useful components that can work efficiently on various mobile applications. Here is a glimpse of the features

Here is a comparison of the above four frameworks (note: Sencha Touch mentioned here refers to Sencha Ext JS).

React Native

If you like native mobile apps, there are probably two main ones you use - Xamarin and React Native. Xamarin allows you to write apps in a similar way to native apps, including similar interface design and calls.

React Native (from Facebook) takes another approach, a completely different path, to native app development. It uses JavaScript code, CSS-like stylesheets, and HTML-like markup for layout. Here's a chart that clearly illustrates the popularity of React Native:

Therefore, if your team is familiar with React, React Native would be the best choice.

Meteor

Meteor is another JavaScript framework for developing interactive mobile applications. Meteor not only allows you to develop mobile applications in JavaScript, but also allows you to continuously control the application. With this feature, you can update the JavaScript code and publish it to users on all mobile platforms immediately through the real-time code push feature, all without the need for developer support.

Another feature of Meteor (version: 1.0) is that it maintains a local copy of the data through a miniMongo database running in the phone's memory. In addition, Meteor will complete all data communication and synchronization between the phone and the server. (miniMongo is a JavaScript implementation of the MongoDB API.) This is its architecture:

NativeScript

NativeScript is a toolset invented by Telerik for building native mobile applications for multiple platforms from a single source code. The NativeScript website and GitHub page describe the runtime as enabling developers to build native applications for Android, iOS, and other platforms using JavaScript and TypeScript (even Angular 2.0).

The architecture of NativeScript is as follows:

Rachet

Ratchet is another major element of the latest JavaScript framework for developing mobile applications. It aims to provide developers and designers with a framework to build mobile web applications. The framework is created by the same team that brought us Bootstrap to ensure that Ratchet is of high quality. Whether you want to target Android, iOS, or both, Ratchet 2.x can help you achieve it.

[[181653]]

Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is one of the best mobile JavaScript frameworks. If you are a big fan of Angular, then this framework is for you. It provides essential mobile components that Bootstrap 3 misses: Switches, overlays, scrollable areas, sidebars, absolute positioned top and bottom navbars, and some of the mentioned features.

However, with the release of Angular 2, the concept has also changed a little bit. So for the admirers of Angular 2, Onsen UI 2.0 can be a good choice.

all in all

The criterion for choosing a suitable JavaScript framework for mobile devices is not the features included in the framework, but the functions that the application framework can provide in the program development project. Therefore, choosing the right JavaScript framework according to your project needs can save a lot of time and cost.

This article was originally published on ValueCoders.