There are two types of mobile smartphones available today: those that run iOS and those that run Android.

Operating systems for mobile devices

Apple Inc. created and distributes iOS, a mobile operating system. It was first released with the iPhone in 2007 and is now available on a variety of additional devices, including the iPod Touch, iPad, and Apple TV.

iOS is based on the macOS operating system, which is used on modern Apple computers.

Android

Android is a Linux-based open-source mobile operating system. The Open Handset Alliance, which was led by Google and included contributions from a number of other firms, produced Android.

While Android was originally designed for phones, it now powers everything from tablets to wearables to refrigerators.

How do you make mobile apps?

There are two ways to think about modern mobile app development, similar to how mobile devices can be divided into two general categories: native development and cross-platform development.

Development of indigenous peoples

This approach of creating a mobile app entails employing specialist gear to create it for a certain mobile operating system.

To create apps for iOS, you’ll need to use XCode, a macOS-only IDE (integrated development environment), and code in Objective-C or Swift.

The Android SDK (software developer kit), which runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, is used to create apps for Android devices.

Native mobile apps for each mobile OS are developed for a variety of reasons, including speed, security, and stability. The major disadvantage is that if you want to create an app for both iOS and Android, you’ll have to build it twice.

Development for many platforms

This method of development employs a framework to write an app once, then construct iOS and Android versions. Here’s a rundown of some of the most well-known frameworks:

Ionic

Ionic is a mobile app development framework that is open source. It offers a variety of tools and services for creating a native-looking mobile UI. To run on mobile devices, the Ionic framework requires a native wrapper.

Cordova is an Apache project.

Apache Cordova, formerly known as PhoneGap, is a mobile development framework created by Nitobe. Adobe Systems now owns the company. The developer does not need to know Java or Swift to use this framework; all they need is a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Native React

Facebook’s React Native is a cross-platform mobile app development framework. React Native, like React, allows developers to create mobile apps using JSX, a JavaScript branch. While it has a higher learning curve than other frameworks such as Apache Cordova, React Native allows developers to use more native device functions such as the camera without the use of additional plugins.