How to Choose an Appropriate Mobile App Technology Stack for Your Project

Many of our customers participate in meetings with our team. They tell us about their expectations towards an app and we explain how we can achieve them. As a rule, this doesn't take much time, but helps a lot in selecting the most suitable and cost-efficient mobile app stack corresponding to both business needs and set tech goal.

Through this article, we would like to show businesses how to pick the most technology stack for mobile applications.

This is the most popular solution among both business owners who want to scale and startuppers who need to roll out a great product. And there are strong reasons for that. Native apps are productive and highly reliable in terms of security. Furthermore, they can access various smartphone features that other app types cannot (e.g. NFC module, camera, address book).

So, let's consider a mobile technology stack for the most popular platforms.

Programming languages: Objective-C, Swift

While it's rather a personal decision which toolset to choose in this case, the pick of a programming language concerns the mobile technology stack and influences the app development process. Let's start with languages:

To create an application, developers use a dedicated software that's called an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Programming languages: Java, Kotlin

Android native apps can be built with a variety of languages. But only two of them are recognized by Google as official languages for Android development. Let's consider them in more details:

Compared to iOS, the toolset for Android for developing native apps has more IDE options to choose from. However, we'll consider the most popular ones.

Technology: PhoneGap/Apache Cordova, Ionic, Sencha Touch 2

In fact, a hybrid app represents a website wrapped in native containers. That's how they can access some native features of a platform or hardware (e.g. camera), while an ordinary web app cannot do so.

Hybrid apps are developed with the help of such technologies as HTML5, CSS as well as JavaScript. Such combination helps to empower hybrid apps with cross-platform capabilities.

Put simply, hybrid apps look alike to native and can be distributed via app stores, but they are based on websites. In turn, technology stack for hybrid apps differs from anything we've discussed above as developers should use various frameworks and plugins to make them work.

Let's consider the most up-to-date frameworks for the hybrid app technology stack.

This is a web-based framework that enables cross-platform app development. In general, PhoneGap is a popular distribution of Apache Cordova developed by Nitobi Software (later acquired by Adobe). So, think of Apache Cordova as the engine powering the PhoneGap framework. This framework is equipped with JavaScript APIs that allow accessing the device on a hardware level.

However, to build apps with this framework, you should have an IDE that is supported by a platform (e.g. Android Studio or Xcode).

This is another open-source framework you may want to include in your mobile development technology stack for a hybrid app. The Ionic framework was created especially for fulfilling the hybrid development needs. It uses HTML, CSS in combination with JavaScript and supports a variety of extensions and plugins from third-party developers. In addition, Ionic is easy and fast to learn compared to other similar frameworks like jQuery Mobile.

It's a powerful platform that leverages capabilities of several technologies like HTML5, ExtJS framework as well as JavaScript. All this allows building complex hybrid apps with responsive UI that are very similar to native apps.

As for Ionic and Sencha Touch, many popular IDEs support these technologies natively or with the help of a plugin (e.g. solutions from JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse, and so on).

Technology: Xamarin, React Native

Hybrid apps can be referred to cross-platform as well. The difference is they are rather websites imitating native apps.

In a perfect world, native cross-platform apps use one code base to work on several operating systems. Let's consider what technologies you should use in your mobile app stack to build a cross-platform app.

It's often selected as a part of mobile technology stack for native cross-platform apps. It makes possible to write code in C# programming language or .NET framework. As soon as the code is written, it's compiled into the native UI of Android, iOS or Windows.

The technology lets developers build and test apps, as well as monitor them in the cloud. In addition to this, Xamarin supports a cross-platform UI toolkit.

This is another popular choice for mobile technology stack when it comes to cross-platform apps. This framework allows developing for both iOS and Android platforms. Apps built with the help of React Native have a common JavaScript code base.

The framework provides different tools for debugging and packaging that help to save time. In addition, developers can check how their code works on a screen of the device in real time.

These technologies are supported by the same IDEs as in the case with hybrid apps.

The choice of the appropriate technology stack is an important part of software development service. It will influence the stability of your app and usability for customers.

If you need any help with building your project, you can drop us a line. Our tech-savvy managers will consult you and help to decide on the most suitable mobile technology stack.

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