Best tools and platforms to build a great mobile app

In 2020, global mobile app spending on both Google Play and the App Store reached $111 billion and is expected to reach $270 billion by 2025, according to a State of Mobile App Market report. This rapid growth can be attributed to the surging smartphone market. 

Businesses are increasingly developing robust, secure, and innovative cross-platform and hybrid mobile apps to reach their target customers and attune to their customer’s needs. And the good news is that developing a mobile app today doesn’t require years of training, programming experience, or even a huge investment.

What are the best mobile app development tools for business or other use?

Ionic

Ionic is a free, open-source mobile development framework that allows teams to build fast, high-performing, and appealing hybrid and progressive web and cross-platform apps using HTML5, CSS, and SASS. If you’re looking to automate your workflow and deploy bug fixes and features without requiring Mobile Device Management approval, this tool is for you. 

Not only is Ionic a powerful and stable platform that allows for faster mobile app development time but it also features intuitive UI components that allow you to create highly interactive apps that run smoothly on several OSs. 

JFrog (for DevOps)

For dev teams or organizations looking to drive continuous mobile application releases from any source to any destination, JFrog’s universal, end-to-end DevOps pipeline is a great solution to have. The multi-cloud DevOps platform allows you to streamline your portfolio and deploy mobile app updates and content changes into devices, automatically and continuously. It’s probably one of the best platforms out there for integrating everything in your organization into a seamless experience.

BuildFire

If you’re a non-technical professional looking to build and launch high-performance mobile apps in less than an hour, BuildFire could just be the application development solution you need.

With its high-end custom development capabilities and simple drag-and-drop UI, BuildFire is a powerful and flexible platform that you can use to create professional-grade Android and iOS mobile applications for your business. 

Sencha

If you’re developers looking to create data-intensive HTML5 mobile applications with a high level of responsiveness, Sencha’s comprehensive JavaScript framework, Ext JS is for you.

With over 140 high-performance UI components and hundreds of user extensions, this tool offers everything you need to easily create aesthetically pleasing native mobile and web apps via front-end web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

The cross-platform development tool allows for visual data representation, supports WebKit browsers, and offers extensive support for enhanced touch events. With this tool, the cost and complexity of creating fast and intuitive mobile apps across multiple device types is greatly reduced. 

Xamarin

Known for its mono framework that completely exposes the mobile devices’ native APIs, Xamarin is by far one of the most preferred platforms when it comes to building native apps. It’s an open-source, cross-platform app development platform that uses C# and supports iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.

The Microsoft-powered platform offers a development ecosystem with versatile backend infrastructure, code editing tools, UI design components, diagnostic tools, cross-platform libraries, storyboard files, and more. It also allows application deep linking and indexing.  

React Native

Launched in 2015 by social media giant, Facebook, React Native is one of the best open-source frameworks you can use to create rich mobile apps for iOS, Android, Web, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

This tool comes with a wide range of powerful features including shorter app development times, Node Package Manager for installation, declarative API for predictive UI, easy integration with third-party libraries, and dual-screen live reload development.

The best thing about React Native is that it uses JavaScript and gives you full access to the native platform. Plus, it has an extensive and tightly-knit community of supporters around the world. Walmart, Tesla, Bloomberg, and Skype are just some of the leading companies that use this tool for their applications. 

Appcelerator

If you’re looking for a powerful, enterprise-level tool that can build native, cross-platform applications that run on any OS with fewer lines of code, Appcelerator is for you. 

Appcelerator uses JavaScript and offers over 5,000 APIs for Windows, Android, iOS, and browser-based HTML5 mobile apps. The best thing about this tool is that it allows for cross-platform code reusing, data testing, integration with continuous delivery tools, and more. It also offers real-time mobile analytics and provides support for any new operating system (OS) releases. It may not necessarily be the easiest mobile development tool to learn, but you can always expect fast development times and rich native mobile apps  

Mobile Angular UI

If you already have some background knowledge or experience with AngularJS and Twitter Bootstrap, using Mobile Angular UI to create hybrid mobile and desktop apps is going to be easy. This is an open-source framework with cool UI mobile components such as toggle switch elements, sidebars, navbar, tabs, modals and overlays, accordions, and dropdowns. These are some of the components that you won’t find in Bootstrap 3, which means you can create responsive, mobile user-interface and amazing mobile parts using Mobile Angular UI.

This tool relies on fastclick.js and overthrow.js to build fully responsive interfaces and deliver a better mobile experience. 

Phone Gap

Another cross-platform app development tool that works effectively with Web APIs, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript is Phone Gap. The Adobe-powered framework allows you to work with one code base and produce hybrid mobile applications that can’t be distinguished from native mobile apps. 

The best thing about this open-source tool is that it gives you some flexibility with the way you design and engineer your mobile apps. Plus, it features a robust backend infrastructure which makes mobile app development faster.  

jQuery Mobile

jQuery mobile has been in the mobile app development scene longer than most of the tools in this list— and it still has a lot to offer to developers. The jQuery mobile framework allows developers to build their complete basic mobile app interfaces in HTML, with fewer lines of JavaScript code. Built on jQuery core, the jQuery Mobile framework uses functionalities of jQuery UI, jQuery, CSS3, and HTML5 to provide API features for apps.