Expert Recommendations for Hybrid Mobile App Development Platforms

 

Hybrid mobile app development is a strategical way of building cross-platform mobile apps that is cost-effective. Making the worlds of both Native and Html5, these are developed using web technologies such as Html5, JavaScript, and then wrapped them into a native container which has access to extraordinary features. There are a lot of options available in the market to pick for your Hybrid Mobile Application development.

Nowadays, Xamarin and Ionic frameworks are the trending platforms for building hybrid applications. Having extraordinary advantages with tremendous performance inside both, the matter of selection has become an anticipated topic of debate among a lot of developers for the last few years. The points include not just about performance but also other factors like code reusability, Front-end design, size of the application, etc. These can make application development much easier, accessible and faster by using existing web technologies such as Html, CSS, and JavaScript.

Well, selecting the right one suitable for your app development is depends on many factors. These may include your timeline, team experience, target audience, and especially Budget. Not only just going through online information, but it would also be suggested to understand the pros and cons of every option, having better grasp of the choice, and then you could easily find the right solution.

So, let’s discuss significant hybrid mobile app development platforms recommended by few experts.

 

Xamarin

Xamarin is a unique and open-source platform that is based on the .Net framework. It gained huge popularity in building modern applications that are compatible with iOS, Android, and Windows with excellent performance. Xamarin acts as a crucial layer between shared code and underlying platform code and manages the communication. It has great support for vast .Net libraries, tools and provides add-ins to Visual studio that helps in building the applications for different platforms. Apart from that, Xamarin works with the latest SDKs and makes use of platform-specific APIs.

Let’s discuss some of the Pros and Cons of the Xamarin platform:

Pros:

• It enables the developers to write the code once and utilize it everywhere.

• Because of the backup of the biggest giant i.e., Microsoft, it guarantees development support, vast opportunities of learning, performance stability.

• We can able to see the details of app crash activities, devices, etc. with Visual Studio App center.

• Code maintenance becomes very easy, unlike other platforms, because it has the advantage of interchangeability between Android, iOS, and Windows platforms.

• It provides Applications with fewer bugs, it allows a single API that is used for different platforms.

Read More: Top 10 Hybrid Mobile Application Development Technology Considerations

Cons:

• Pricing is one of the main disadvantages of Xamarin. If one has a requirement of Commercial project development, then the license of IDE is required which doesn’t come cheap.

• Many Xamarin iOS limitations were noticed such as limitation in .Net API, no option of remote, lack of proper generic support, etc.

• There were limitations found in Android Xamarin like partial Java generics support, java generation support and dynamic language support is limited.

• Xamarin lacks the support for Game development.

• Xamarin makes app size larger than native apps for every release.

Ionic

Ionic is an open-source mobile app development framework that creates it simpler to develop top and unique quality native and progressive web apps with web technologies. Abdul Rehman of VPNRanks says, “Ionic is easy because it is component-based framework and its code can be reused at multiple places. Moreover, you can cater multiple platforms like mobile, desktop and web from a single code base whereas with platforms like Xamarin, that's really difficult. Ionic development is also cost and time friendly as compared to other hybrid platforms.”

Deepu Prakash, SVP - Process, and Technology Innovation at Fingent Technologies adds, “When it comes to hybrid app development you can’t go wrong with the Ionic framework. It’s true that Ionic has been out for a while but it’s a robust platform and with age comes with its unique set of perks.”

He also shared a few factors that tip the scale in favor of Ionic.

Reliability: You can count on it to develop complex apps and the results are stunning when combined with Angular JS.

Support: Ionic has the largest and extremely supportive community of developers supporting it and thanks to its age and popularity.

Developer friendly: It is easier for developers to learn to use the framework thanks to the Angular concepts used. Explanation and solution for pretty much every feature and bug you may encounter are available.

Here are some impressive lists of Ionic features which assists in swift development of complex applications

• Ionic CLI has inbuilt development server and debugging tools

• Abundant UI components make it perfect for PWAs.

• Integrated emulators and Cordova app packages.

React Native

React Native is an open-source mobile application framework originated by Facebook which is used to build applications for Android, iOS, Web and UWP by empowering developers to utilize React along with native platform accomplishments. Charlie Wright, IT consultant at Imprima says, “React has an attractive user interface and has been growing since it was launched in 2015. It enables the use of tools to automate and accelerate development.”

James Zhang from The Bright App adds, “React Native is an awesome paradigm for UI development and the richness of the JavaScript ecosystem is excellent. It does take some getting used to and has a steeper learning curve than some other platforms, but React Native has a lot of developer support, tons of documentation, and works very well for 98% of use cases.”

“The platform uses Common codebase using which developers can build two separate app versions for iOS and Android. Common code reduces the number of possible bugs, and the support of the product is simplified. Unlike other hybrid platforms, React Native uses native APIs.” says Igor Dyachenko, CTO of Cadabra Studio

Stepan Plotytsia, Manager at GTM Plus shared few advantages of React Native framework

• React Native lets developers use JS, so if you have experience with JavaScript, you can easily start to build mobile apps (both Android and iOS).

• This mobile development platform helps you to build interacted apps quite easy and fast because of its broad library of ready components, tools, and forms.

• With React Native developers don’t have to write code from scratch. You can easily switch to the React Native library at any time.

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Native Script

Native Script is a framework for building native iOS and Android apps manipulating JavaScript and CSS. Native Script offers UIs with the native platform’s rendering engine, no WebView’s, evolving in native-like execution and UX.

Native Script was created and is supported by Telerik, provides a best-of-both-worlds development understanding. It is a cross-platform JavaScript modules give the assurance of writing iOS and Android apps from a single JavaScript codebase, while the runtimes provide the power of acquiring native APIs, SDKs, and frameworks when you need all of them without having to open XCode or Android Studio.

“It is an excellent choice for any organization. It is well documented, fast to get started with, and it converts your code into native Android / iOS. Basically, you can get a native performant mobile application by upskilling your organization's frontend developers instead of hiring new app developers.” Says Andreas Pettersson, CTO at Right People Group.

Framework7:

Another essential platform which plays an important part in developing Hybrid Mobile Application development is Framework7. Basically, it is an open-source mobile HTML framework used to build hybrid mobile apps and web apps providing with iOS native look and feel. The only thing you need to do is creating HTML layout including inside with CSS and JS files of the attached framework. The best part of this framework is that it never forces you to make use of custom tags that must be converted by JavaScript code and all at some point.

Many Mobile app development companies use this framework because it provides high performance. It is also packed with a number of in-built and ready-to-use UI elements and could be customized easily.

Onsen UI:

There are several amazing platforms we can find in the market for Hybrid Mobile Application development and Onsen UI is one of them. This framework facilitates us to build both Hybrid as well as web apps. It is an open-source platform. While developing hybrid applications through this, one can utilize it with Cordova/PhoneGap command line, or Monaca tools. This Monaca tool includes CLI, Localkit desktop GUI, Monaca IDE-cloud based IDE for Cordova.

Apart from that, it is an open-source and cross-platform Mobile development platform. It can be used to work with React, Angular, Meteor, pure JavaScript, and Vue.

Appcelerator Titanium:

Appcelerator Titanium is one of the popular Hybrid Mobile App development platforms. To begin with this tool, one needs to download the Titanium studio which provides strong and rapid development features for Mobile application development. Using this we can also create native mobile applications for both Android and iOS by using cross-platform JavaScript APIs.

Not just these, the applications created with the Alloy framework could help you saving development time and are easy to use.

Hybrid Mobile app development - Xamarin or Telerik AppBuilder

 

What is Hybrid App development?

Do you ever realize the difference between hybrid app and native app when you download, install and use any app from app store? Visually and aesthetically, it is difficult to separate mobile apps in two baskets – Hybrid and Native.

Native apps are developed considering specific platform like iOS, Android etc. Web apps are primarily apps that run on browsers. Hybrid app is combination of web app and native app. Hybrid apps are developed using web technologies like JavaScripts, HTML and CSS by mobile application development companies. In addition to web technologies, it also contains some native code to make it portable and compatible with all mobile devices.

Hybrid app is a good choice for mobile application development companies as it requires developing one application that is portable and compatible with all mobile device platforms like iOS, Android and Windows. This reduces overall time and cost of mobile app development making it more lucrative option over Native app development .

Ionic, Xamarin, Telerik AppBuilder, React Native are some of the platforms to use for Hybrid app development. Xamarin has been taken over by Microsoft recently. Telerik AppBuilder is in market since long.

Xamarin Hybrid App development

Xamarin is a .NET based mobile app development platform recently acquired by Microsoft. It is claimed that no other platform enables businesses to all device platforms like iOS, Android, Mac and Windows with greater reusability, scalability and compatibility than Xamarin.

Mobile application development companies use same data structures, language and APIs for different platforms. Complete app is written using C# and code is shared between platforms. C# is the language covering features of Java, Swift and Objective C making it suitable programming language to create native apps with cross-platform compatibility.

Read More: Top 10 Hybrid Mobile Application Development Technology Considerations

Reasons to use Xamarin

• There are 20,000+ NuGet .Net libraries and Xamarin components available

• User friendly IDE, Xamarin Studio for Visual Studio, Windows, or Mac

• Multi-platform testing on 1000+ real devices online

• Efficient error handling and reporting

• Add data synchronization with external devices through integration

Telerik AppBuilder

Telerik AppBuilder is another popular hybrid mobile app development platform that allows developing, testing, debugging, building and publishing cross-platform mobile applications with Apache Cordova or NativeScript. Mobile application companies can enjoy developing mobile apps using Telerik AppBuilder extension for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Reasons to use Telerik AppBuilder

1. Using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, mobile developers can write once and build native-running hybrid mobile apps.

2. jQuery Mobile and Kendo UI Mobile for AppBuilder mobile projects

3. Realistic simulation, powerful debugging and real-time device updates

4. Easy app publishing using “publish to app store” wizards

5. Integrated cloud backend services for managing and storing app data

6. Enjoy your favorite Visual Studio features, such as:

   1. Advanced code editing features such as built-in code snippets and IntelliSense.

   2. JavaScript and CSS minifying and obfuscation.

   3. Work offline mode capability

   4. TFS, SVN and other source control system integration

Comparative analysis of Xamarin and Telerik AppBuilder

	Xamarin	Telerik AppBuilder
Platform requirements	Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio	Telerik AppBuilder extension for Visual Studio
Development cost	Low	High
Deployment cost	Low	Moderate
Development time	Less	More
Portability	Yes	No
Development speed	High (still depend on the native browser)	Slow
Maintenance cost	Low	High
Skills needed to reach Android and iOS	HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Mobile Development Framework	Objective-C, iOS SDK, Java, Android SDK
Performance	High	Low
Graphical performance	High	Moderate
Cross-Platform	Yes	No
Distribution	App Store/Market	App Store/Market
Universal Windows Platform	Supported	Not Supported
Source	Open Source	Paid
App performance	Moderate	Fast
Better Previews	Better UI	Moderate UI
Example	Instagram

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Device Access and features
	Xamarin	Telerik AppBuilder
Camera	Yes	Yes
Push Notifications	Yes	Yes
Contacts	Yes	Yes
Offline access	Yes	Yes
File upload	Yes	Yes
Geolocation	Yes	Yes

Conclusion

Hybrid and Native app have its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Mobile application development companies should consider customer’s requirement and decide the approach. Telerik AppBuilder and Xamarin also offer unique advantages and disadvantages and we discussed based on various parameters. Consider customer requirements and map them both platforms and decide the best platform.

Critical Factors for Agile Scrum and Expert Opinions to Make It Successful - iFour Technolab

 

The scrum implementation method is the most popular and very quickly growing among agile methodologies. This is one of the essential factors in the project work of any Software Development company. According to the report, 56% of agile practitioners use scrum in their projects. Scrum implementation in IT Project helps agile practitioners in flexible project planning and execution. Scrum implementation gives special importance to constant contact with customers that leads to higher customer satisfaction. In the scrum, the method customer-defined all requirements at the beginning of the development process. Scrum method excludes the sequence of phases in the project and focuses more on relationships with the customer.

Critical Success Factors

1. Category of Project Team

Contiguous factors relate to the workspace of the project team members. If you talk about the localization of project team members then it is directly related to the organizations. Some team members have their workplaces in the immediate nearness, and the other in a remarkable distance from each other. If project team members do not locate within a short distance from each other then they face communication difficulty. The distance between the project team members can restrict the freedom and prevalence of communications, as a result, unfolding of individualism, which would be a threat to the successful scrum implementations and project management concepts.

2. Cultural and Psychological Aspects

The Self-reliance of team members, associated with low skills in team working and the hesitation to share problems. These kinds of negatively affect the creation of a cooperation-oriented, harmonious, and encourage disinclination, which is opposite to the idea of scrum implementation in IT projects. Always being late in meetings and absenteeism at meetings and the lack of information about having to be absent at meetings.

3. Process and Method

As we all know that the commitment of the scrum master in the Scrum team, as well as the role of the product owner, who had detailed knowledge of the business needs and product backlog, is very significant. In absence of scrum master during the scrum meetings or his/her finite efforts in helping the development team were major problems that come up with many problems in the scrum implementation. The understanding problem of project principles and values by all the scrum members in the scrum team.

Read More: Challenges In Agile Project Management Methodology

4. Environment

Sometimes overlapped entire organization appointments with project meetings. Stiff adherence in the organization to the adopted schedules and plans, dependencies between the teams and limited communication with customers.

5. Technology

Sometimes the use of innovative technologies that the scrum team did not know and had to learn, lack of competence of team remembers, may create uncertainty and risk which adversely affected the success of the Scrum implementation.

Expert Views to Optimize SCRUM (Agile) Implementation

1. Actually Follow Scrum Process and Iteratively Improve Process

“I've seen it too many times where a team says they are going to follow Scrum for their team, and then proceed to no follow any processes that are even remotely Scrum. Just because you say you are implementing Scrum, doesn't mean you are. Others take the idea of "make it work for you" too far and twist it into something completely not Scrum.

Instead teams, should start with true Scrum methodology and iteratively improve over time. If you start with a solid foundation and improve it from there through actual practice, you will have a high chance of success. Do not start from some contrived form of Scrum you came up with and try to run a project that way.

The key point is Actually followed the Scrum process and iteratively improve the process. You can't forget to improve the process.”

- Tim Harrison, VP of SQA²

2. Collaboration Between the Team and Product Owner

“The biggest mistake most organizations make when implementing Scrum is thinking that becoming Agile is easy. As the Scrum Guide says, “learning Scrum is easy, mastery is hard.” Being Agile is adopting a new mindset built around self-organizing and empowered team. The Scrum practices are the scaffolding that helps a team become Agile and deliver incrementally and iteratively. But the magic is collaboration between the team and product owner working closely together to deliver products of the highest possible value.”

- Alan Zucker, Founding Principal of Project Management Essentials LLC

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3. Listen to Your Team

“Listen to your team about how often and when to have the Daily Scrum, but keep the Scrum itself crisp.

The Daily Scrum is a short check-in meeting that happens at the same time every day. The problem is that not all teams are moving at the same pace, so daily might be too often — or not often enough. When teams don’t have much new progress to report, daily Scrums become tedious and create a sense of stagnation rather than progress. For these teams twice or three times a week might be better. But no matter how often a team Scrums, the structure of the meeting is the same: three questions (What did I do? What will I do? What help do I need?) and two answers (Thank you! - or - I can help with that!).”

- Katherine Radeka From Rapid Learning Cycles Institute

4. Plan for the Team, Optimize for Individuals

“The highest priority any scrum master should seek is to optimize each and every developer resources (Time, knowledge and experience), That's what I call "Plan for the team, optimize for individuals". Events should be planned for the team and to serve the team goal through iterations (sprints), however, on each retrospective, the main question to ask as a scrum master, are we optimizing the process for each and every individual? if any event is a waste of time for any team member, then you, as a scrum master, have some serious problem to tackle.

Another thing to keep in mind, as a scrum master, you are a servant to the team, not manager. Your ultimate goal is to empower the team itself (through the team members abilities and experiences) to be able to remove any roadblocks with the least amount of help from you or other external sources. Micromanaging the team in a way that you are the main roadblocks remover won't scale and won't allow your team to glow. Micromanaging the team in a way that you are the main point of contact for problems isn't scrum, but a very classical approach of managing. Your ultimate goal is not to remove the block, but to provide your team members the best process to remove the block.”

- Fady from Titrias.com

5. Magic Power of Buy-in

“When implementing Agile frameworks and Scrum, in particular, many organizations go one of the false ways – either imposing it as a law from the top management, neglecting the people’s opinion, seeing it as a team level toy in order to please the demanding customer; or viewing it simply as a short term experiment that is destined to decay very fast. All of the abovementioned is the result of lack of communication and consensus between involved parties or, in short, absence of buy-in.”

- Andrew Romanukha, Scrum Master at Symphony Solutions

6. Keep the Customer Involved

“The customer is an often-overlooked player in the Agile/Scrum world, but is a crucial component to the success of any Agile project. One of the essential challenges that a scrum master faces is to keep the customer involved and engaged throughout the development lifecycle.The key principles on which Agile is founded depend on constant feedback from the business customer.

In Agile, we accept, and even welcome, changing requirements. We strive to deliver value early and continuously. We acknowledge and understand that the customer’s personal vision of the software is often different than how it is initially implemented by the software team. In my experience, a partially finished product is often a great catalyst to spark a conversation that helps a developer understand where the customer is coming from, or for the customer to realize that what they need is actually quite different than what they asked for.

Without a customer present, the software team is unable to react and adjust to the customer's needs. Without a customer present, the team is not Agile.At a minimum, the customer should be represented at all end-of-sprint demos, and ideally, should be able to interact with working software every sprint. Whenever possible, the customer should participate in planning sessions, as well as any backlog grooming meetings.

The customer should review and approve all acceptance criteria and be responsible for UAT signoff on each completed story. It's the responsibility of the scrum master to make sure the customer attends the appropriate ceremonies and to conduct those ceremonies in a way that they are actively engaged. The scrum master should always ensure that the customer understands their critical role as an invaluable member of the team.”

- Steven Baylor, Senior Engineer and Partner of Applied Logix

7.Commit to the Process

“You have to commit to the process. Companies that have difficulty implementing SCRUM tend to implement a hybrid of SCRUM and their current project management processes. Secondarily, understanding, and adhering to the time boxes allotted for each phase of the SCRUM process is paramount. If you don't adhere to the time boxes, you'll find yourself having more meetings than necessary and become burned out and feel that SCRUM does not work.”

- Laura Fuentes, Operator of Infinity Dish

Conclusion:

A Scrum team should be focused on flexibility, creativity, and productivity. The project team factors have a significant effect on the establishment of an involved scrum project team, Separate areas of competence of the team members is an important factor associated with the specific competences of project team members. The appearance of casual relations made people not want to disappoint each other.

.NET Core by Microsoft - New step towards cross-platform software development - iFour

 

What is .NET Core?

.NET Core is a subset of .Net framework but modular, cross-platform, open source for building more comprehensive software that can be used over a numerous platforms. Being cross-platform, gives advantage to ASP.NET Software Development Companies to develop all .net applications on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comprises of several components such as managed compilers, base class libraries, the runtime and different application models. The .NET Core doesn’t depend directly on base libraries as a dependency but rather they are distributed in NuGet packages which can be accessed on any platform. The goal of .NET Core is to have a single code base that can be used to build and support all the platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Features of .NET Core

Read More: How To Use Asp.net Core Web Apis For Web Development

 

• Cross-Platform: Any application built using .NET Core can run across different platforms like Mac, Windows and Linux. The best choice for software development companies to develop cross-platform software, web apps, or websites withVisual Studio Codefor various platforms like Windows, Mac and Linux.

• Open source:.Net Core project is available on Github as an open source Project to be accessed for versatile and more transparent development. The active community serves as a powerful support for the development of .NET Core build applications.




• Modular:Instead of the libraries in dll to be available for dependencies, it is available in different small modules as NuGet. For specific feature requirement, one does not require including the whole core assembly as dll but can directly import the small module from the NuGet.

• Native Development Environment:Microsoft has introduced very lightweight and cross-platform development tool which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac called Visual Studio Code. It has Intellisense for better development and help you in every step during code writing. Inbuilt debugger makes it more powerful. The most important part of the Visual Studio Code is availability of various extensions. Several extensions are available for the development as per your need. It has support for npm and bower as well.

• Developer Productivity:Microsoft has packaged their own lightweight web server called Kestrel. It has many uses, from development to cross-platform compatibility and help run the website on Mac OS and Linux environment. The process of compiling the project before viewing it on the browser has been eliminated in this server.

Comparison with .NET Framework

Features	.Net Core	.Net Framework
Platform	Available on Linux, Mac and Windows	Available only on Windows Only
Project Source	Open Source available on Github	Closed Source, Maintained privately by Microsoft
Development Environment	Visual studio Code and command line Interface which is very lightweight	Visual Studio, Visual Web Developer for web application
Portability	Upgrade different application side by side	Have to update the all the application
Runtime	CLR	CoreCLR
Compiler	Just in Time Compiler	RyuJIT, Improved JIT Compiler
Web Apps Supports	Yes	Yes
Command-line apps	Yes	Yes
Universal Windows Platform apps	Yes	Yes
Windows Forms	No	Yes
Windows Presentation Foundation	No	Yes
Update	Update from NuGet Package separately	Comes with Microsoft windows update

Comparison with Mono

.Net Core	Mono
Subset of .NET Framework rewritten for cross-platform compatibility	Implementation of .NET Framework for Linux
Modular architecture	Integrated architecture
Develops various range of applications	Mostly develop mostly Mobile based application
Supports WPF	Does not WPF support
Supports many language available on NuGet	Supports only C# for development
Does not support WPF or Windows Form	Supports WPF and windows forms
Supported by Microsoft	Supported by Xamarin

Advantage over other technologies

• It works on file system which allows faster development cycle. It detects changes, compiles in memory and load the application.
• Project based configuration and setting, for example, you have 2 different projects which need different versions of the framework under the same server, unlike in Java which shares a common framework to work on application.
• It uses completely new lightweight and modular HTTP request pipeline.
• It uses JSON over XML for configuration settings because it is very lightweight and faster. For example, json and Project.json.
• It is designed to work with various client-side frameworks including AngularJS, KnockoutJS and Bootstrap.
• A very lightweight and new development environment for easy development on all three major platforms Windows, Linux and Mac.
• Supported by Microsoft all way with an active community on Github along with the .NET Core project.

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Conclusion

Microsoft has taken the first step towards cross-platform development that has inherent properties of the .NET framework. This platform has the potential to revolutionize the development of cross-platform applications for ASP.NET development companies.

As it is new, so there is a shortage of tutorials and documentation but with time it will develop as the .NET framework has developed in the previous decade.