10 Best Mobile App Development Frameworks in 2026

Frameworks are an integral part of the modern-day app development process. But choosing the wrong framework for your app project may result in financial and product failures. If you’re new to this world and considering the best mobile app development frameworks to realize your mobile app idea, this article is the right place for you.

What are Mobile App Development Frameworks?

A mobile app development framework is a software platform that already integrates essential tools (e.g., compilers, APIs, or code libraries) to render your development job faster and easier. 

In other words, instead of wasting time creating a mobile app from scratch, developers have a framework to handle low-level or basic tasks and provide reusable code for different platforms. Meanwhile, programmers only need to focus on advanced functionality, hence reducing the total development time.

Mobile app development frameworks are now divided into three main groups:

• Native frameworks provide tools to separately develop either iOS or Android apps.
• Web app frameworks are designed to build progressive web apps (PWAs).
• Cross-platform frameworks allow cross-platform designs that work on different platforms and operating systems.

Three Types of Mobile App Development Frameworks

Before you dive deep into the top frameworks in 2026, you absolutely need to grasp the fundamental ways that mobile applications are actually built. 

We generally see the frameworks broken down into three main groups. Let’s discover them!

Native Frameworks

A native framework is specifically designed to build an app for only one platform, typically either iOS or Android. 

Some common native frameworks of iOS include UIKit and SwiftUI, while Android offers the traditional Android UI Framework and the modern Jetpack Compose. Developers combine these frameworks with platform-specific languages (e.g., Swift, Kotlin, and Java) and development environments (Xcode, Android Studio). 

These technologies allow your native apps to have direct, complete, and totally unencumbered access to every single feature the phone offers. We’re talking about the camera’s deepest, most arcane settings, super-specific sensor data that other frameworks just can’t touch, and the entire file system without any translation layer getting in the way.

Hybrid Frameworks

Cross-platform framework – Flutter and React Native, for example – combine with other technologies to build apps that can work seamlessly across platforms and devices. They let you write and deploy a single codebase across both iOS and Android devices. This, obviously, saves an absolute ton of time and money, cutting development cycles by a huge amount. 

Some, like React Native, translate or “bridge” the JavaScript code you write into the actual native UI components at runtime. It’s incredibly fast, and the apps feel very “native.” But that bridge can sometimes introduce minor performance jitters or perhaps limit access to the newest OS features until the framework gets updated. 

Others, like Flutter, use their own rendering engine and language (Dart) to literally draw the entire UI from scratch. That means the app looks exactly the same on both platforms. This specific approach often leads to very reliable performance and super-fast UI development for the team.

Cross-Platform Frameworks

Now, hybrid frameworks often work with web technologies (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) inside a minimal native “shell” to create apps that can run across platforms. These apps often work inside a component called a WebView, which is just a tiny, embedded web browser. That embedded browser gives the whole thing a native feel but crucially, not true native performance.

Hybrid frameworks can be Flutter, React Native, Ionic, and more. They’re widely adopted for projects that are heavy on content, have super simple functionality, or for companies that might only have existing web development talent and need to get a mobile presence fast.

10 Best Mobile App Development Frameworks That You Should Consider

The mobile app development segment is now awash with frameworks whose attributes are supportive of effective development projects. If you have no idea of where to start, this part will detail the top 10 popular native and cross-platform frameworks you should consider.

1. React Native

React Native is an open-source, cross-platform framework backed by Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly known as Facebook). This means the technology allows developers to program once for the frontend terminal and use code across operating systems. 

Apart from that key feature, React Native also comes with other outstanding functions, for example:

• Hot Reload is a special component of React Native. It enables developers to make changes while the app is still running.
• React Native facilitates the user interface (UI) development of iOS and Android apps by using JavaScript functions, which are often called “native modules”. For this reason, the platform gives developers an advantage to build native-like products.
• The platform supports a variety of third-party libraries to foster the app’s performance and other functionalities. 

However, a developer may encounter some problems when working with React Native, typically including:

• A tough learning curve;
• Debugging issues if they aren’t adept at the platform;
• The unavailability of several custom elements forces developers to build them from scratch, but they can end up with different codebases for respective operating systems instead of one. Not to mention that some advanced native features require the involvement of native developers.

Recommended reading: Flutter vs React Native: Which One is Better for Business?

2. Flutter

Created by Google, Flutter has increasingly grown its recognition from the developer community. With only a single codebase, the open-source platform empowers developers to easily build cross-platform products for iOS and Android. 

Since its introduction in 2015, Flutter has improved the app development experience of programmers with exceptional attributes as follows:

• Dart language provides more advanced components to flexibly customize UI designs for any screen, facilitate debugging, and enhance the app’s performance with ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.
• Dart virtual machine (VM) incorporates the Hot Reload feature to allow the immediate updates of new code in running apps.
• Skia, a graphics engine written in C++, helps develop and remove widgets faster to enhance rendering performance.
• A huge collection of design-driven widgets helps Flutter apps look more attractive but still fully functional.

On the flip side, Flutter apps are criticized for their large size. Besides, they are programmed in Dart. So developers must spend time learning the less popular language and its functionality. That may increase the overall development time of Flutter app projects.

3. Xamarin / .NET MAUI

Xamarin is a renowned cross-platform framework. After Microsoft’s acquisition, Xamarin has become an open-source tool that enables developers to create native features and deliver the same scripts between different platforms thanks to the use of the .NET framework and C# programming language. Therefore, Xamarin draws developers’ attention to its code reusability and improved UI development experience.

But unfortunately, Microsoft stopped its active support for Xamarin in May 2024 to channel its entire effort to .NET MAUI. This modern, open-source framework is an evolution of Xamarin.Forms, released in 2022. It inherits the best parts of Xamarin, including structure and syntax. But it still adds new features to build cross-platform UIs in C# and XAML:

• Let developers build a shared codebase – or in other words, handle all platform-specific needs within a single project. Accordingly, you don’t need to create different projects for different platforms (this is what Xamarin requires) and can implement as much of your app’s UI layout and logic as possible in one place. 
• Use a handler architecture to monitor how UI elements work on different platforms (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows), ensuring better performance. This system replaces old, low-performing renderers of Xamarin. 
• Use Hot Reload to adjust the app’s code and UI in real-time. 

4. SwiftUI

SwiftUI is a famous native framework that developers can use to build UIs for all Apple products, not just limited to the iPhone. Before SwiftUI, Apple introduced UIKit – an imperative framework that requires you to tell the system how to build and update an app step by step. This approach was slow and produced some bugs.

So, Apple released SwiftUI in 2019 to handle this issue. As a declarative framework built entirely on Swift, SwiftUI allows developers to simply describe how the UI should look based on your current data state, and the framework will handle other complex stuff. This reduces boilerplate code needed to write and speeds up development.

SwiftUI uses properties like @State and @ObservedObject to manage your app’s data state. And when the data changes, it’ll update the UI automatically, hence reducing debugging effort.

However, SwiftUI still comes with some limitations. The framework lacks some highly customized UI elements that inherently existed in UIKit. Further, it only lets you build native apps for Apple products, not for other operating systems.

Recommended reading: Let’s Face It: Are Mobile App Development Dying?

5. Ionic

Ionic is a free cross-platform framework developed on the basis of cutting-edge web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 or JavaScript. Besides, the framework aims at using modern web components (e.g. Custom Elements or Shadow DOM) to make its web APIs more stable than other hybrid frameworks.  

This trait, together with the capability of working with Apache Cordova, AngularJS, React or VueJS, helps Ionic developers make progressive web and native apps that run seamlessly on iOS and Android platforms from a single codebase. 

A wide selection of such integrated hybrid app frameworks also lets developers approach numerous UI components and functions to create impressive user interfaces. Compared with other cross-platform frameworks, Ionic has a shallow learning curve and strong community support. 

Besides the mentioned prominent factors, Ionic shows some cons, typically like its apps’ poorer performance than native counterparts or sluggish operations on graphics-heavy software. 

6. Jetpack Compose

​​Jetpack Compose is a modern UI toolkit that Google introduced to simplify and speed up the UI development of native Android apps. Its first production-ready version was released in 2021. 

With Jetpack Compose, developers don’t need to build old XML layouts. Instead, they use intuitive @Composable functions written in Kotlin to create the UI. In other words, developers just need to describe how the app screen should look based on the current data and let the framework automatically handle other UI tasks, like drawing the layout, updating it based on data changes, and managing state. 

This approach is known as “declarative” and allows developers to use less boilerplate code and powerful tools to build visual elements without significant effort.  

Jetpack Compose is an amazing tool for those who want to purely build native Android apps, but not for cross-platform apps. Further, it only supports Android 5.0 (API level 21) and higher.

7. Unity

Unity is a powerful game engine, but can be considered a development framework for gaming apps or those requiring advanced graphics, 2D/3D interactions, and AR/VR experiences. 

People often think of Unity only for games—and, sure, it totally dominates mobile gaming. But it’s actually an extremely powerful, cross-platform engine for building high-fidelity 3D and 2D interactive content. 

If your app needs serious, real-time visualization, like a retail app that lets you virtually place furniture in your home (AR), or maybe a healthcare app with complex 3D modeling for training, Unity is generally your best bet. It supports deployment to virtually every platform imaginable. The code is mostly written in C#, which is handy if you have a .NET background, by the way.

In addition to that selling point, Unity gains traction due to its ability to build a project once and deploy it to various platforms, from mobile devices to PCs and consoles. The quality of finished products is beyond question. But be careful, Unity still has some drawbacks, typically its inability to natively support linking to external code libraries.

8. Apache Cordova (formerly PhoneGap)

Previously, Apache Cordova was known as PhoneGap, a project acquired by Adobe Systems in 2011. Then, in late 2012, the company donated the PhoneGap codebase to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF renamed the project to Apache Cordova, making it an open-source framework to build cross-platform apps using CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript. 

As the evolution of PhoneGap, Apache Cordova is highly renowned for its simplicity and speed. As already said, it allows developers to use standard web techs and offers plugins to wrap the code in a native container. This helps you build hybrid apps that can access hardware features (GPS, cameras, etc.) to deliver native-like experiences.  

One notable advantage of Apache Cordova is that it lets developers write a single source of code that is then packaged and reused for multiple platforms. The framework also integrates well with external app management tools to streamline development, testing, and deployment. With all those features, Apache Cordova is considered a cost-effective and fast approach for mobile app development.

However, in comparison with newer cross-platform frameworks like Flutter or React Native, Apache Cordova performs more slowly, especially in apps requiring high-speed UI transitions or smooth animations. Therefore, it works best if you have a legacy app built on Apache Cordova or if you just want to build a simple content-delivery app that needs rapid deployment across platforms.

9. NativeScript

NativeScript is an open-source mobile app development framework released in 2014. It lets web developers who use JavaScript, TypeScript, and their frameworks (e.g., Angular and Vue.js) build mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms from a single codebase. 

You can install NativeScript and all its managed plugins using the package manager npm in the command-line tool or the GUI tool (e.g., NativeScript Sidekick). When you write UI layout in XML, NativeScript will interpret and map that XML file to actual native UI components on iOS and Android platforms. This way, the framework can directly access any native API—iOS or Android—from your JavaScript code without needing separate bridging modules. 

NativeScript is not as widely adopted as newer frameworks, like Flutter and React Native. But it’s a stable choice and gives developers a higher-performance native experience. Those relying heavily on Angular or requiring full native API access from a shared codebase may prefer NativeScript.

10. Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile

The last framework for mobile app development in this list is Kotlin Multiplatform. While Kotlin is a main programming language to build native Android apps, Kotlin Multiplatform – released in 2017 – aims to help developers build cross-platform solutions, which, however, still retain native experiences. 

Unlike other cross-platform frameworks, Kotlin Multiplatform itself is not a full-stack cross-platform UI solution. Instead, it’s a code-sharing approach, letting you write the non-UI parts of your app (business logic, the networking layer, database calls, and other complex stuff) in Kotlin. Then, you can compile that single code into modules and reuse it in your native iOS and Android apps.

Do you want something to keep top-tier native performance in your app, while removing all the boring work of writing business logic for separate platforms? If so, Kotlin Multiplatform is a good choice for you. It seems attractive to those with existing, mature native apps who want to reduce maintenance costs without compromising UX.

Comparison Table of Mobile App Development Frameworks

You have already learned the details of the best mobile app development frameworks. And now, let us summarize the key points:

How to Choose the Best Mobile App Development Framework

Each framework in this list (and many more out there!) has its notable features, offering undeniable benefits and visible drawbacks. Not all of them fit your business standards and end-user demands. Choosing incompatible frameworks may turn your work out of control and diminish the app’s performance in achieving your targets.  

Therefore, if you want to choose the best framework for your mobile app development project, consider the following criteria:

Whether you use internal teams or hire external developers, the framework choice should fit their technical skills. For example, if you have highly skilled JavaScript developers, using frameworks like React Native is definitely their strength.

• Framework capabilities & maturity

Which features do you want your app to have? Which capabilities does a framework have to fulfill your feature requirements? For example, if you want to build a cross-platform app with native hardware access (e.g., cameras or Bluetooth Low Energy), choose cross-platform frameworks with strong plugins and stable performance. 

Further, you should evaluate how often the framework updates its public API and tooling. This is crucial if you want to avoid bugs or issues caused by the incompatibility between new OS versions and cross-platform behavior. 

Does a framework support you in customizing the UI or delivering top-tier performance? This question helps you find out whether the framework meets your UI/UX requirements. For example, if you want full code-sharing flexibility, Kotlin Multiplatform is worthwhile. Meanwhile, Unity is more ideal if you demand complex AR or visually intensive 3D experiences. 

• Vendor and community support

Even for a mature framework, you still have to encounter issues sometimes. That time, you may require active and strong vendor/community support to address your issues quickly. So, learn about how the framework provider offers technical support (we mean, through which channels). 

Building Best Mobile Apps with Designveloper

There’s no denying that a framework brings developers many advantages to building mobile apps resourcefully. It can reduce development time, enhance code efficiency, and ease the debugging process, while still guaranteeing product security.

Consider your project requirements and evaluate a framework’s capabilities thoroughly. This way, you may find the best mobile app development framework for your project.

But look! Navigating mobile app development isn’t easy, and you’re looking for someone trustworthy to accompany you on this journey, aren’t you? This is precisely where you can count on Designveloper.

As a leading app development company based in Vietnam, Designveloper is a huge hub for top-tier tech talents who have successfully implemented 100+ projects over the years. We aren’t tied to one specific language or technology, but have hands-on experience and technical skills across 50+ technologies. 

We can look at your specific business goals, your budget, and who your target audience actually is. Whether you need deep AR functionality or just a simple content portal, we can effectively blend the right technology for the job.

We don’t just build apps, but build smart, stable, and future-ready mobile solutions that are precisely tailored to succeed.

Ready to stop guessing which framework is right for you and actually start building? Contact us and share your idea!