“What app development tools should I use?”
Stay tuned as the answer to the above question is going to be discussed within this article. Overall, the concept of using tools for app development is about giving the developer flexibility to smoothly build applications with desired features.
These tools give us superpowers by helping us accomplish the most essential elements of a high-quality app. It’s not a joke, you can really speed up your app development with these tools. So, you are doing everything on your part to realize the app’s success.
It can become difficult to choose the ones that will be most helpful due to the numerous tools available. So, we’ve curated a list of the top app development tools to fuel your app development.
Deployment Tools
Buddy
Buddy is a cloud-based platform that makes CI/CD and DevOps easy to help you develop, test, and deploy better apps faster. With over 100 pre-built actions and support for many languages and frameworks, Buddy lets developers from any background build custom applications.
Key Features:
- Features user-friendly and intuitive user interface.
- Low learning curve.
- Allows integration with Github, Azure, Bitbucket, Slack, and many more platforms.
- Enables you to use features that include docker layer caching, concurrent pipelines & steps, changeset-based deployments, vCPU, and RAM Scaling, etc.
- Allows quick building, testing, signing, and publishing of your Android application in a single click.
- Includes powerful automation capabilities.
- Easy configuration with GUI and YAML.
- Features dedicated activities for Android: Ionic, Flutter, React Native, and more.
Testing Tools
Kobiton
Kobiton is an excellent tool for executing manual as well as automated mobile and web tests by using real devices and next-gen automation. This tool enables the testers to easily run tests on a number of browsers and mobile devices instantly for delivering faster releases.
Key Features:
- Secure platform with the partnership of APP-RAY.
- Allows you to carry out parallel testing.
- Enables scriptless mobile test automation.
- Supports test automation frameworks Appium, Selenium, XCUI, and Espresso
- Automatically captures the complete activity logs of testing sessions.
- Offers internal Device Lab Management (DLM) to properly utilize internal devices.
- Allows sharing of centralized testing activity to increase collaboration.
- Allows you to start testing in minutes.
Cross-Platform App Development Tools:
Ionic
Ionic is an open-source app development framework to create fully functional and advanced mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows with a single code base. This cross-platform tool comes with a large catalog of platform-specific UI elements for mobile app development.
Key Features:
- Allows integration with numerous tools.
- Includes a wide range of plugins to help you connect to users’ native phone APIs.
- Ionic is front-end agnostic means you can use any JavaScript framework like Vue, React, and Angular for your apps.
- Provides a library of UI components to help you build GUI or use these components for customizations.
- Quick prototyping using drag & drop interface.
- Trusted by brands like NASA, Nationwide, McDonald’s, and Sworkit.
- Provides concise documentation and a strong developer-centric community.
- Developer-friendly is due to the use of popular technologies and one codebase that can be used for different platforms.
Xamarin
Xamarin is a cross-platform mobile app development tool that allows you to develop applications by writing code in a single language (C#) and then leverage it across other platforms. With this robust tool, you can create apps with convenient UIs and native or near-native user experience.
Key Features:
- Reusability of up to 90% of code across platforms can reduce the development time.
- Easy to learn and use due to the single language in the technology stack.
- Backed by a huge community and Microsoft support.
- Open-source nature of Xamarin.
- The choice for free and paid components from the Xamarin Component store.
- Easy maintenance and low maintenance cost of apps due to the code reusability.
- Provides testing solutions to the performance of your app which results in flawless apps.
- Supports app development for smart devices such as Apple Watch and Android Wear.
Sencha
Sencha is a great application development platform that gives you everything you need to develop powerful apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices. With the state-of-the-art tools and 140+ pre-integrated UI components that Sencha provides, you can build stunning apps.
Key Features:
- Provides extensive UI widgets such as menus, toolbars, lists, forms, and carousels.
- Sencha Test offers dedicated testing for your Ext JS applications.
- Allows developers to code in HTML5 format.
- Faster native app development due to easy and quick setup.
- Supports animations and enhanced touch events.
- Easy to set up your touch app because of the rationalized configuration system.
- Scalability of apps to different resolutions for maximum compatibility.
- Enables development of cross-platform apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows.
App Development Framework:
KendoUI
KendoUI is a user interface framework that aids developers in creating eye-catching, responsive, and high-performance applications. This framework is a complete JavaScript UI toolkit for Vue, React, Angular, and jQuery to develop eye-catching and professional applications.
Key Features:
- Developed by keeping performance in mind.
- Includes built-in MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) library for effective development of user interfaces.
- Offers the native look and feel to the apps for respective platforms.
- Provides 110+ UI widgets and a plethora of data visualization gadgets.
- Allows you to add advanced UI components such as charts, data grids, calendars, and schedulers.
- Enables easy data binding for local and remote data due to heavy use of DOM.
- Provides handy documentation, great support, and a large user community.
- Allows you to easily deliver an experience customized for the user’s screen size on phone, tablet, and desktop.
AR (Augmented Reality) Tool:
Vuforia
Vuforia is a Software Development Kit (SDK) used to create rich and immersive augmented reality applications by using Vuforia Engine, Studio, and Chalk. This augmented reality (AR) tool enables you to develop both marker-based and markerless AR experiences.
Key Features:
- Provides Vuforia Object Scanner to recognize 2D and 3D objects like boxes, cylinders, and consumer products.
- Includes already built-in customizable vocabulary with over 100,000 English words for text recognition.
- Features Vuforia Engine playback which allows video to be played directly on a target surface.
- Enables the use of Vumarks that are custom markers used in face recognition and encoding data.
- Allows expanding of supported visual sources beyond mobile phones and tablets.
- The smart terrain feature helps to build a 3D model of the environment by reconstructing terrain in real-time.
- Enables developers to build apps that can detect and track image targets.
- Allows you to add digital content to horizontal surfaces in your environment by using Vuforia Ground Plane.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) Tool
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a software tool based on deep learning neural networks that helps you bring machine learning to mobile apps. It is a buzzword in machine learning that allows you to build and train models using APIs like Keras.
Key Features:
- Helps you to estimate human poses from image data with the pose estimation feature.
- Allows you to use it in two ways either loading it via script tags or installing it via NPM and using a build tool.
- TensorFlow.js provides a model converter that can be used to run your existing models.
- An open-source platform that makes it available for all users.
- Developed and backed by Google with a large community of developers.
- Allows you to train multiple neural networks and multiple GPUs.
- Compatible with Keras to let you code some high-level functionality sections.
- Compatible with many languages like C#, C++, Ruby, Swift, Python, and JavaScript.
Conclusion
Hence, these are the tools that will make your life easier and more enjoyable in the world of mobile app development. You must also admire these tools’ significance if you are serious about developing a top-notch mobile app in 2022. There are lots of other tools which can be useful for you and I listed only eight of them.
