While this article is focused on mobile apps, it’s worth mentioning that if you want to create desktop apps with web technologies, you can use the open-source Electron, created by the GitHub team. For Android and iOS you can use the WebView manually or the open-source Apache Cordova framework. Windows 10 supports the creation of universal apps using JavaScript and web technologies with the official WinJS framework and Visual Studio (even with the free Community edition). The final package will contain both the native code and the web-based code. When the web stack doesn’t offer a solution for one specific situation, you can always rely on pure native code (Java, Swift, or C#) and create a bridge between the web stack and the native stack. Just as with any basic web app, HTML and CSS are used for the presentation, JavaScript is used for the logic, and several web-based APIs are used for data storage, data transfer, and hardware access. The apps in this category are usually known as hybrid apps, or native web apps. It’s like a browser embedded in a native app. ![]() The WebView is a native control in the mobile OS that renders HTML, CSS, and SVG and executes JavaScript code. Using the web stack approachįor the web stack option, you'll use tools that leverage the WebView to render your app's contents. The web stack, on the other hand, will use a web engine to render elements and execute the logic in a browser instance (without the tools and search bar around it), even if it’s contained in a native package that will be distributed from the app store. If you decide to distribute your app through app stores and you're not using the native languages and tools, you have two options:Ī native stack will generate native code-transpiled from the language you wrote the app with-that will be executed on the platform, usually using the same native UI controls. Going through the browser may be mandatory if your app doesn’t follow the stores’ rules, or it may be a product decision if you have sufficient traffic to your website. Through the app stores (Android's Play Store and Apple's App Store).The first big decision you need to make about your app is how to distribute it: ![]() Distribution: The first determining factor for choosing a framework ![]() If you're not aware of the main frameworks, I'm going to help you sort through all of them, and if you're already familiar with this ecosystem, you should find this updated information about the frameworks and the current state of tooling to be very helpful. Luckily, I have some experience using and teaching these web-native mobile application frameworks. The problems are that, with so many cross-platform solutions and frameworks available, the menu is quite confusing and different tools deal with various combinations of layers in the application. Plus, most mobile app frameworks let you build the app once and deploy to both Android and iOS with few code changes. But that's why web-native mobile application frameworks exist-so that developers can build mobile apps with the web languages they already know. When a team works mainly with web technologies (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) it doesn’t always have the time or the skill set to learn Java, Swift, or Objective-C and build mobile apps in the native official languages for Android or iOS.
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