As you know that mobile app business has been booming recently thanks to the smartphone industry growth. Mobile & hybrid app developers help businesses to develop their mobile apps using the latest technologies. They always must keep an eye on new technologies and updates. As far as hybrid app development is concerned, there are many powerful technologies queued-up in 2018 that should be considered by developers. After all these new frameworks and techniques are powerful enough to give mobile app users a unique experience.
In this blog, I will try to put the light on those latest technological advancements. See what technological gifts 2018 has brought to create magic in your smartphone. But before that, have a glance on next para to recall what a hybrid app actually stands for?
What is Hybrid App, Really?
For those are not familiar with this word- Hybrid apps, these apps are the combination of web apps and native apps, or you can say – these apps are essentially web apps that are wrapped within native apps. These apps are more viable, cost-effective and potentially strong as compare of pure natives. So making a hybrid mobile app, is a wise and fruitful decision for any business. Not just top hybrid app development companies, even top hybrid application developers are seeing this continuous striving and innovative technology as a future of mobile app development.
Read our previous blog to know more about- What is Hybrid app? How hybrid apps are better option to choose over iOS apps, androids apps and web apps?
From a user’s point of view, there is almost no difference between a hybrid app and a native app. The only thing, they care about a top-class mobile app that meets all their standards. They don’t even care about the technologies and frameworks that are used to build an app. However, app developers are also thinking in the same way, one another thing that steals the heart of developers is- single codebase used for hybrid apps. No developer wants to write separate codebases for different platforms i.e. iOS and Android devices. Hybrids apps let them leisure to make a user-friendly app for which they only need to write a universal codebase.
See which frameworks 2018 has brought for hybrid app developers
Ionic 4 beta
The ionic software is a known name for top hybrid app developers built with AngularJS & Apache Cordova. It primarily uses web technologies such as CSS3, HTML5 and Sass. This super-amazing framework is in hybrid-game for five years. Over the passing years, its makers- Max Lynch, Ben Sperry and Adam Bradley keep releasing its improved versions to give rich internet applications. Ionic 4 beta is the best version of their Ionic series that comes with powerful theming capability, significant performance, build time improvements, brand new documentation, multi-framework compatibility and much more.
The release of modern compiler Stencil makes Ionic 4 beta bragged high-quality Web-view performance. Just cross your fingers to stub out the older Cordova and believe in latest Stencil. Top hybrid app developers are seeing these potential frameworks as a great choice to build web and mobile apps.
Flutter
The tech giant, Google has unveiled the first version of Flutter- ‘Sky’ at Dart developer summit in the year 2015. Now, it brought its latest framework named “Flutter” last month. This framework is specially designed for the software projects written in programming language DART. Its architecture is designed by including three major components such as 1) Flutter engine, 2) Foundation library and lastly 3) Design-specific widgets. Here unconventionally, the third point is grabbing all the attention. This is because Flutter is more focused on “Widgets-concept”. It also lets you do device API access, hot reloading and performance profiling.
While talking about its future perspective, I can say that it will definitely rise in popularity as its maker- Google is consistently generating the content supporting this interesting framework. I am sure that I would be game-changer for the software development industry.
NativeScript 4.0/4.1
The recent release of NativeScript 4.0/4.1 got the attention of top hybrid app development companies to build cross-platform apps targeting both iOS and Android markets. The NativeScript’s webinar happened in June 2018 left everyone amazed with a keynote of an announcement of its much-awaited version 4.1 with the impressive performance. The highlights of this webinar were as follows:
- For Android apps, the launch time would be 50% faster,
- It supports Angular 6,
- It has added some amazing new UI: modal navigation (in Angular), ARKit (for iOS), & CSS gradients.
NativeScript 4.0/4.1 seems to be a promising framework because of its excellent adaptability with other languages and technologies like TypeScript, vanilla JavaScript, Angular and Vue. It will definitely remain in app development race for a long run.
Weex
Since top hybrid application developers like to play with Weex’s online playground. Popular company Alibaba has launched Weex that is a powerful software supporting other front-end frameworks like Vue.js or Rax.js. This software also works on the phenomena- write once, run everywhere. With weex, developers get a weex-toolkit that will help them in many ways. For example- to start a project, to set-up the iOS/Android development environment, to install additional plugins, to debug some code etc.
If as a developer, you love to explore new advanced features then Weex is definitely the one that you should try on for your upcoming projects.
Fuse services
Red Hat has introduced Fuse services framework into the app market which is much similar to Flutter. It is a pluggable engine that provides a high-quality performance paired with robust and more secure services. It uses front-end APIs such as JAX-RS and JAX-WS. With this, a hybrid app developer will get a desktop tool- Fuse Studio that helps them to create Fuse apps for cross-platforms.
Conclusion
If we summarize all the above-stated technologies, then there is much more to discover in hybrid app development this year compared to earlier years. There are so many powerful frameworks and software in the market. All software can be helpful to create a rich internet application. Hybrid app developers can use any one of them to explore the new dimensions of their mobile app development journey. As every time app developers try to create a mobile app that will steal the show with its most innovative features and latest technologies, they are now gifted with a bunch of new technologies available this year. So here is the call to all the developers. Download the latest software and start a new chapter of your hybrid app development today.
