How to Choose the Right Tech Stack for Mobile App Development?

50% of the startups fail in their first 4 years and not addressing market needs is one of the most common reasons behind their failure. Mobile application development is the need of the hour of almost all kinds of startups. With the help of mobile applications, your potential customers can access your services with just a finger tap. But, mobile app development is not an easy mission.

Bringing a mobile app idea to execution, engaging your potential customers to your mobile app, and driving a good profit can never be an easy task for many businesses. In maximum cases, mobile app developers enjoy creating challenging applications in order to lure their tech-savvy generation and can easily prove their technical mettle, but often their goods and services backfire owing to poor choice of technology stack.

After considering the fact that competition in the mobile app development market is surging like never before, placing a buggy or off-putting application offering based on old and outdated technology stack is really a bad idea- it can also tarnish your reputation and divert your profit to your competitors in the industry.

In order to rein hurting your brand value and offer bigger than ordinary experiences to your potential customers, it is a must to vet carefully and select the best stack for technology for the smartphone app development. Your decision will help you streamline a mobile application with the right back-end and front-end, alongside looping the desired aspects of efficiency, robustness, and security.

Why Should You Choose the Best Technology Stack for Your Mobile App Development Project

There are a plethora of elements that depend on the selection of the right technical stack for mobile application development. The likelihood that your mobile application will be robust or will be able to expand on various versions of their operating system, is totally dependent on the combination of technology you select to develop.

Any wrong decision, not calculated with regard to selecting anything but the best technology stack for mobile applications, can adversely affect its performance and future growth prospects. While these are the problems that are attached to a deeper level, which you will only encounter when you are involved in the development of mobile applications, there are a plethora of first-level issues associated with the wrong selection of the smartphone application technology stack as well.

Since you now know what the mobile app development technology stack is and why it is crucial to know the technology stack, let us get to the section where we can look at the technology stack that helps you create scalable, innovative, and feature packed mobile apps from the factories of any skilled application development company and their development field.

Java

When it comes to Android app development, the Java programming language is bound to top the list. It is an Open Source Object Oriented Programming language that comes with a grand bunch of tools and libraries that makes it easy to create top grade mobile apps. Here are some of the reasons reasons why Java programming language is beloved tech to craft Android mobile apps:

Vast set of core features
Highly secured (gets executed outside the JVM)
Automatic memory management
Portable and scalable
Accelerated assembly within Gradle
Multi-threading capability
Faster build process
Huge open source support ecosystem

A hard-to-miss downfall with Java programming language is the fact that it’s sometimes slow and eats up memory in a significant manner. However, overall the programming language is much-loved for its scalability, robustness, and ability to create complex mobile applications.

Kotlin

While being compared with Java, Kotlin is fairly new app development technology, making a worldwide appearance in the year 2011. This app development programming language can be deemed as a perfect solution that blends power and simplicity, and is supported by JetBrains, with a plethora of third-party contributors.

Along with being a popular object oriented programming language, Kotlin creates an exceptional choice for functional application programming by supporting various high end functions and lambadas. In addition to this, it makes Android mobile app development easier by speeding up various day-to-day tasks of development.

Nowadays, Kotlin is emerging as a go- to option in order to enable mixed-language projects. Here are some of the top benefits of using this as an alternative to Java-

Language is concise and safer
Open source
Extension functions
Supports full Java interoperability
Lazy-loading feature
Multi-platform
Helps to reduce bugs and errors in the code
Active community

You can also expect more growth of Kotlin programming in this coming years!

iOS Tech Stack

Swift and Objective C- these are two languages rules for iOS mobile app development. Highly sought-after toolsets for creating iOS based mobile apps are JetBrains’ AppCode and Apple’s Xcode.

Objective C

Based on the C programming language, Objective C is a High-Level Language (HLL) that was used for creating iOS based mobile apps before the inception of the Swift technology. Created in the mid-1980s by Stepstone, this is a superset of the C language and is widely chosen by several mobile app development companies in India and rest of the world to write mobile apps for Mac, iPhone, Apple watch, iPad, and more similar devices. The prominent reasons for picking Objective C for iOS app development includes-

Easy and better use of private APIs
Highly approved, thoroughly tested programming language
Compatibility with C++
Expressive message syntax
Massive community support
Plenty of third-party libraries
Simplicity & access to various Apple technologies

Still, Objective C is fairly popular but after the Swift arrival, the dynamics are changing rapidly. However, for creating complex products, this programming language is still ruling the app development world. As long as Apple is favoring Objective C, there’ll always be a market for this programming language.

Swift

Swift is a multi-paradigm open source iOS mobile app development language, which is widely used for creating top-performing OS X and iOS apps. This young-age technology is becoming most popular and top rated technologies among iOS mobile app developers. According to the Stack Overflow’s 2018 survey, it is suggested that Swift is getting a lot of preferences from the professional developer community-

Here are some of the reasons why Swift programming language is ‘trending’ and getting major limelight nowadays-

Modern and feature-rich programming language
Operates faster- better performance
Easy code readability and maintenance
Safe and less prone to errors
Compatible with Objective C
Multi-device support
Dynamic libraries
Active community support

Many application development companies are planning to hire dedicated Swift developers in order to deploy and design the best iOS based software products. It is possible that this programming language can soon reach the top of the mobile app development charts.

Hybrid Mobile App Development

Hybrid mobile apps are crafted in order to ensure the speed of web app development and achieve the UX of a native mobile application. All these mobile apps are created by using a set of standard web app development technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS and hosted inside a native mobile app which utilises the WebView of a mobile app development platform.

That being said, let us now discuss about some of the most frequently used hybrid app development frameworks in order to fuel the development process- Apache Cordova & Adobe PhoneGap, Sencha Touch 2, and Ionic.

Adobe PhoneGap & Apache Cordova

Adobe PhoneGap & Apache Cordova is a web-based hybrid mobile app development framework which is widely used to create cross-platform mobile applications using hyper text markup language. As a matter of fact, this framework offers the main strength to the PhoneGap; which happens to be a perfect distribution of Apache Cordova. In addition to this, it can also be used to create mobile applications that are native to Android, iOS, and Windows by using a combination of web app development technologies. It lets website designers to create develop a mobile app by creating use of the properties of the local gadget assets.

Sencha Touch 2

Sencha Touch 2 is one of the most efficient and popular hybrid mobile development frameworks that blends the features of multiple mobile app development technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and ExtJS. This framework is an ideal choice to create dynamic mobile apps that work on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle Fire, and many more. In addition to this, if anyone wants to roll out a complex hybrid mobile application with an interactive user interface as that of a native mobile app, Sencha Touch 2 is the ultimate option!

Ionic
Ionic is an Angular-based hybrid mobile app development framework that empowers mobile app developers to create versatile and powerful mobile applications boasting a unified feel and look. As your know that around 47% of users expect their web or mobile app to load in 2 seconds or less and Ionic can help you in that way due to its optimized coding and high performance. It is an open source framework and 100% free, and a fitment to design basic native like functionalities for a mobile app in order to run on different operating systems and devices. Just design a mobile application once, and deploy across different iOS, Android, and Windows devices. The key benefits of using this framework comprise-

Supports rich and robust development
Rapid mobile app development- no need of coding everything from scratch
Mainly created in CSS, HTML, and JS, which are familiar languages
Several ready-made plugins
AngularJS compatible
Engaged community

Another aspect is the fact that the mobile app development cost as well as maintenance with the Ionic app development is less when compared to Android development and native iOS mobile app development.

Let’s talks about the cross-platform mobile application development which is an intermediate programming language, such as JavaScript which is widely used for such kind of development which is not native to the operating system of devices. This opens up various ways to share a common code (around 80% to 90%) across different targeted platforms, thus saving the overall efforts, development time, and costs. There are two technologies, Xamarin and React Native that are largely used to mimic the functionality of native mobile apps, learn about them here-

React Native

Created by mobile app developers at Facebook, this is a wildly popular Open source javascript framework, much loved for building exciting mobile applications that are supportable by both iOS and Android. This new-gen React technology makes it easier to create a class user interface and provide a seamless user experience to the end users, which altogether contributes to boosting brand value and driving profits.

There are a plethora of reasons to hire React native Developer for your cross-platform mobile app development, but top-most perks can be listed here-

Cross-platform compatibility
High performing apps- as fast as native
cost-effective and faster mobile app development
Third-party plugin compatibility
Live reload feature
Highly responsive and fluid user interface

Behemoth brands such as Bloomberg, Walmart, Instagram, Facebook, etc, use React Native
Mobile app development for better development environment.

Xamarin

Xamarin is one of the top rated technology stacks which is being used for the development of native cross-platform mobile applications. Xamarin app developers can write code in languages like .Net Framework and C. Once the code is in place, it’s compiled with the native Android UI or iOS UI. Here are the top advantages that whirl around Xamarin mobile app development:

TestCloud to test mobile apps automatically
Allows to utilise MVVVM or MVC design patterns
Native user interface
Productive code & high performing
Supports iOS, Android, and Windows platforms
Shared app logic
Fewer bugs
Vast community support
Xamarin component store

Xamarin is now emerging as one of the major players of cross-platform app development services. This framework is best-suited for those app developers who are fond of Microsoft technologies and products.

Let’s Sum Up:

We can say that among aforesaid and other trending mobile app development technologies, you should select only those technologies that best-aligns with the vision and needs of your project. Your informed decision will help you hit the right bag and enjoy a dominating and successful presence in this online world. There are many companies from where you can hire mobile app developer who work on these latest technologies to provide your the best app development solutions as per your requirements.