Best HTML5 Mobile Apps UI Frameworks
While the fight is still on whether HTML5 Apps are better or Native Mobile apps , the market is flooded by both and the number of free downloads are expected to grow to 138,809 Millions by 2014 as per the Gartner Report. Since the growth rate of paid apps is much less than the free apps, there has to be a way to keep the cost of developing apps low.HTML5 Mobile Apps are in the market for quite some time and they have evolved a lot. There’s no doubt that the HTML5 apps are a cheaper means to develop because of the following reasons :
HTML5 Apps are built on WORA concept( Write Once Run Anywhere ), one can develop for iOS, Android, Windows and BBM by writing the same code. ( You can read how to develop HTML5 apps by clicking here )so the cost of development is very low.
The cost for Maintaining and Supporting HTML5 Mobile Apps is less as there is only a single code base .
jQuery Mobile
One of the oldest UI Frameworks around, this is the most widely used mobile framework. This is light weight, extensively uses jQuery and includes huge number of third party plugins and themes. One of the reason of its popularity is that it’s free and open source (MIT licensed). There are large number of resources available online(Stack Overflow) that can teach how to use and will help in development.
However, personally we feel that this framework isn’t that robust and can’t handle heavy applications. Problems like flickering are rampant and jQueryMobile continues to improve.
Based on the popular MVC architecture, Sencha Touch comes with 50+ built in components . Developers can also created their own components and it also gives storage, device profile and top-level application abstractions. Now supporting phonegap, Sencha Touch is giving tough competition to jQueryMobile.
Developers having hands on experience in ExtJS and Backbone.js will not have any problems developing mobile apps in Sencha Touch.
While there aren’t any performance issues like that of jQueryMobile, the fact that it’s not free completely may be a disadvantage.
Telerik’s brain child Kendo UI Mobile has been the buzz word and those who have used it, rate it the best. Based on the MVC Framework like Sencha Touch, there aren’t any major performance issues. Having developed many financial apps in this framework, this will certainly capture the market very soon. The only disadvantage that it has the huge cost which makes it not so suitable for developers but companies.
This is a part of the large Kendo UI Framework which makes it the best available option for web, mobile and the desktop apps. They have the much talked about “flat” theme of the iOS and otherOS specific themes and functionality.
## [Intel App Framework – ex jQMoby][2]</strong>
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The much talked about Intel’s framework is fast, optimized for iOS and Android but not reliable. It has MVC framework and it also allows external framework to work along. There’s no need to depend upon Phonegap for this small and light framework.
However, the documentation available on the website isn’t detailed. This framework is still in developing stage.