Cross-platform mobile app development allows you to build mobile applications for multiple platforms such as iOS and Android with just one technology stack.

This means that instead of creating multiple versions of your app, each written using the dedicated native language for each platform, you can write your code once and deploy it on several platforms at once.

What is developer experience?

Developer Experience (abbreviated as DX) describes the experience developers have when they use client libraries, SDKs, frameworks, open source code, tools, API, technology, or any services.

DX shares some ideas and philosophies from User Experience (UX) design.

How does this make a difference?

The opportunity to deploy a web app with a single terminal command is an indication of what can be perceived as a better developer experience, as opposed to following a lengthy list of instructions to achieve the same results.

DX is one of the latent factors that drive developers to use a tool and stick to it.

This post compares the DX of some popular cross-platform mobile frameworks based on four factors that are really important for developers:

• Setup
• Documentation
• Hot reloading
• Debugging

Our comparison will focus on 5 cross-platform frameworks:

• React Native
• Flutter
• Xamarin
• Ionic
• NativeScript

Getting started

A framework is setup is its first impression. Getting started easily is what influences DX first about the workflow of the framework.

Here we’ll be comparing the setup process of the different mobile frameworks, disregarding Android Studio and/or XCode setup because this is basically mandatory step for all of them.

#react-native #xamarin #flutter #ionic #nativescript