Best Programming Languages for Mobile App Development

An average smartphone user spent 2 hours and 55 minutes on a smartphone every day in 2019. This is longer than the time spent watching TV or engaging with any other media. About 90% of this time was spent in apps. Clearly, mobile apps are the biggest medium your customers are engaging with digitally. Smartphone users have an average of 80 apps installed on their phone and use at least 40 of them every month.40 a month is quite a lot. Maybe you could create an app that breaks into this top 40!

That’s right. 2020 was predicted to be a great year for app development anyway. But with the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become even more crucial that innovators like you step up to build more digital solutions like mobile apps to help the people and the economy.

A mobile app is the best way to either build a business from scratch or increase your existing business and give it a digital edge. Because studies have proven time and again that businesses that have a mobile app engage customers better and see bigger revenues.

Backing that up is data from App Annie, stating that 90% of customers who enjoyed an app interaction will continue to buy from that company in the future.

In fact, we have a wonderful post on our blog that gives you excellent statistics proving why apps are good for business.

So now that we’ve established all the reasons why you need to stop procrastinating and dive into app development right now, it’s time to get busy.

To bring your next-big-thing app idea to life, all you need is a good mobile app programming language – one that is easy to learn, futuristic, and scalable. A good coding language for apps must have certain properties that not only help develop high-performance apps but also make the developer’s life easier. How do they do that? I’ll answer that as we go through this post discussing the best programming languages for apps.

There are literally dozens of programming languages for mobile apps. If you had to wade through a list of 30 different coding languages to choose one for your app, you’d spend days just doing the research. To save you that precious time and trouble, I have compiled a list of the top 6 languages, any of which will help you develop a fantastic mobile app.

Further, I’ve divided this list by the type of app you want to develop – iOS, Android, or Hybrid – making the selection even easier for you. This way, you spend less time researching and more time actually developing your app.

So without further ado, let’s dive in.

Best programming languages for Native Android App Development

1. Java

25 years later, Java remains the most popular programming language among developers, despite all the new entrants that have made their mark. In a world where new technologies are rapidly replacing old ones, none has been able to replace Java.

One of the main reasons why Java is the first choice of all application developers is that it is very easy to learn and get started, and it also offers extensive community support which is an added help. for new developers.

Don’t let the ease of learning go, Java is a powerful programming language for mobile applications. Some of the best Android apps have been developed using Java, including Spotify, Twitter, and of course, the Android operating system.

With the Android operating system itself developed in Java, you will be able to easily develop any Android application once you master Java. Some of the best features of Java include:

Java's simple, easy-to-understand syntax is much more readable than Python and other coding languages ​​used for mobile app development.

Being an object-oriented programming language, it better handles the complexity of real-world applications.

With its rich API, Java allows you to integrate much more into your application.

Java's rich community support helps new developers really hone their skills and never be left without help. You can expect to find answers quickly and in sufficient detail.

Another thing that you will love about Java is that it is a strongly typed language. This means that it will detect many mistakes you make as a beginner.

To sum up, Java is one of the best programming languages ​​for application development, especially if you are new to application development and need an Android programming language that meets all needs.

2. Kotlin

If Java is the trusty old Corvette that never lets you down, Kotlin is the efficient new Corvette Stingray that combines all the reliability of the old with the modernity of the new.

When Google announced Kotlin as a 100% first-class language for Android development, app developers around the world were ecstatic.

Kotlin takes the best of Java and goes one step further to make it even better. One of the things app developers appreciate most about Kotlin is how easy it is to use and configure. It is open-source and completely free and works on any platform. In addition, it supports almost all development environments.

Thanks to its full interoperability with Java, if some of your code is already written in Java, you can just as easily use Kotlin for other parts of your project, without affecting any factors.

Kotlin might be one of the simpler coding languages ​​to start with because it's one of the cleanest statically typed programming languages ​​used to build applications.

Kotlin's documentation is extremely simple, detailed, and fun, making it a fantastic learning experience when you start your journey into coding languages ​​for applications.

The Kotlin community is large and thriving with renowned experts frequently available on GitHub and other forums, happy to answer any questions from other developers.

In fact, there is even a Kotlin Slack group where you can easily have your questions answered by some of the more well-known developers.

Jetbrains - the creators of Kotlin made sure that developers' concerns came first when developing the language. A secure nullity system, method references, Lambdas, a built-in mutability/immutability system, and easy-to-use flow operators are just a few of the features developers have always looked for, making Kotlin the best language. Android programming.

Best programming language for developing native iOS apps

3. Swift

Shortly after its release in 2014, Swift saw an exponential increase in popularity and was ranked as the most beloved programming language on Stack Overflow in 2015. At the time, Apple said its goal for Swift was "Total and complete world domination", calling it a "modest goal" to that.

Now, about six years later, we can already see Apple achieving that goal. The Apple App Store has nearly 500,000 applications written at least partially in Swift.

The very initiative Swift was created with was Apple's “Anyone Can Code”. Obviously, if you want to get into app development, Swift is your best programming language.

Some of the best apps you've heard of, including Uber, Lyft, Square, and Airbnb, use Swift as the primary programming language for iOS apps.

According to Stack Overflow's comprehensive developer survey, Swift programmers earn an average of $ 120,000 in annual salary.

For anyone considering learning to code, Swift is the best iOS programming language. It's quick and easy to learn, created especially to be user-friendly. It has built-in design features that give you real-time feedback. It helps you minimize errors and keep your code clean.

Swift also lets you write code faster as it cuts down on a number of menial tasks that normally slow down developers and turns complex code into optimized syntax, leaving developers happy and sorted.

Another reason why Swift is ideal for new developers is that it offers a number of built-in tools that make development easier for you.

Swift Playgrounds is an app specially designed by Apple to help beginners learn to code easily with community experts ready to teach. You can use this app to learn coding from scratch in a highly interactive and engaging environment. complete world dominance”, calling it a “modest goal” at that.

4. Objective-C

While Swift has largely become the go-to programming language used for iOS app development today, its older brother - Objective-C - still remains the wisest for many developers.

Objective-C is a superset of C, the oldest of the computer programming languages. This makes it highly compatible with C and C ++ codes. It has been around for over 30 years now and still remains a top choice when it comes to iOS programming languages.

Having been around for so long, it has an unmatched level of maturity, as highly trusted and well-tested coding languages, behind hundreds of successful applications.

Objective-C is a very dynamic language, allowing you to choose between static typing and dynamic typing.

Connecting Objective-C to private APIs is easier and faster.

Being a very dynamic object-oriented language, Objective-C gives you great adaptability at runtime. So you can access private APIs or even simulated objects at runtime. This makes coding much faster and easier.

Objective-C, which has been around for a long time, is also one of the more stable languages ​​that work great for a wide range of types of projects. It is less error-prone, contains fewer bugs, and compiles more easily than its counterparts.

Best programming language for developing cross-platform applications

5. React Native

React Native started out as an internal Facebook hackathon project and has turned out so well that it has grown into one of the best coding languages ​​that can build apps that work on any platform.

That's right, cross-platform apps are apps that don't need to be created separately for Android and iOS. So you can build a single app and deploy it on both platforms, which cuts your development work in half and doubles your reach.

React Native is a robust programming language used for application development that is not limited to a single platform. It has been used in the development of very popular applications like Uber and Airbnb. For various reasons, React Native is the future of hybrid apps.

React Native allows developers to write sections of code and reuse them across different platforms. After deploying the code, they can easily adapt it to the respective platforms by styling the elements and detailing the finer nuances.

In addition to code reusability, React Native also has a number of prebuilt components in an open source library. This means that components already developed by others developed and uploaded to the library can be easily used by you, allowing high speed of development.

React Native offers a streamlined user interface with a very well-sorted implementation order. This makes the apps built into React Native faster, more responsive, faster to load, and smoother to use. There are a number of React Native libraries that just make the job easier.

Another major advantage of React Native is the support for third-party plugins. So if your eCommerce app needs calendar support, you don't have to create a calendar from scratch. React Native allows you to find a pre-built calendar available for use (there are plenty of them) and simply embed it into your app.

The modular architecture, live and hot reloading, declarative coding style, and a number of other features make React Native particularly well suited for application development.

Making it all even more interesting is rich community support and impeccable documentation. All in all, if you want to get started quickly and build a faster, cheaper, and still amazing cross-platform app, React Native is a fantastic mobile programming language.

6. Flutter

Flutter, developed by Google as a Mobile App SDK, gives developers a quick and easy way to build rich, high-performance mobile apps that can easily be deployed on both platforms.

Flutter is essentially a mobile app development framework that uses the Dart coding language and has a rich library of widgets and tools to help you create highly visual and immersive app experiences.

Thanks to its rich widgets, Flutter creates cross-platform apps that feel just as smooth as native apps. It enables faster code writing by making full use of code reusability. This means that you can use large sections of your code as-is on both platforms. All you do is add a few defining UI elements individually to the app and you can have a fully functional cross-platform app in half the time and money.

One of Flutter's winning achievements is Hot Reload - the ability to see code changes in real-time as they change the app. So if you want to change any part of the app, make it look, feel, or function differently, you can edit the code and see how the changes happen in real-time.

Since the codebase is smaller and the same for both platforms, Flutter requires significantly less testing than its native counterparts.

Not only does Flutter have a rich library of UI widgets to help you build visually stunning apps, but it also lets you customize your widgets, really leveraging that rich native experience you covet in a language. programming used for mobile applications.

Conclusion

So these are the 6 best programming languages ​​for developing mobile applications. Of course, there are a number of other wonderful languages ​​like Ruby, Python, and HTML5, but at first, it is better to pick the most popular and get down to business instead of spending too much time researching 30 different languages. .

Depending on whether you want to build Android, iOS, or cross-platform apps, you should only choose one out of two now. Hope this saved you precious weeks of reading and research, which you can now spend learning and developing your app.

No matter what you choose, all the languages ​​on this list are perfectly capable of allowing you to build a fabulous application. So good coding!