Best Development Frameworks for iPhone

Write in JavaScript, and run natively everywhere. Titanium lets you develop cross-platform native mobile applications and build great mobile experiences using JavaScript. Access your application's hundreds of native UI and non-visual components (such as networks and media APIs). Easily include third-party modules in your apps with Titanium's wide selection of community modules and premium support integrations. The Titanium SDK helps you build native cross-platform mobile applications using JavaScript and the Titanium API, which abstracts the native APIs of the mobile platforms. Titanium empowers you to create immersive, full-featured applications, featuring over 80% code reuse across mobile apps. TiDev licenses Titanium under the OSI-approved Apache Public License (Version 2) and is free for personal and commercial use. Create a basic UI, manage event handling and learn about animations, gestures, and orientation modes.

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Starting Price: Free

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Flask

Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework. It is designed to make getting started quick and easy, with the ability to scale up to complex applications. It began as a simple wrapper around Werkzeug and Jinja and has become one of the most popular Python web application frameworks. Flask offers suggestions, but doesn't enforce any dependencies or project layout. It is up to the developer to choose the tools and libraries they want to use. There are many extensions provided by the community that make adding new functionality easy.

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Starting Price: Free

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Onsen UI

Experience streamlined development with zero-time setup, using the technologies you already know and love - Javascript, HTML and CSS. Worried that PhoneGap / Cordova apps are slow? Fear not! All animations in Onsen UI have been tuned and optimized to perform well on a wide range of devices. We take great care to ensure that apps made using Onsen UI feel smooth even on lower end devices. Onsen UI is easy to learn while being a powerful tool to create complex mobile apps. We have lots of learning resources including official documentation, an interactive tutorial and a community forum where your questions get answered. A rich variety of UI components specially designed for mobile apps. Onsen UI provides tabs, side menu, stack navigation and tons of other components such as lists and forms.

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Starting Price: Free

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Mithril.js

Mithril.js is a modern client-side JavaScript framework for building Single Page Applications. It's small (< 10kb gzip), fast and provides routing and XHR utilities out of the box. Mithril.js is used by companies like Vimeo and Nike, and open source platforms like Lichess. If you are an experienced developer and want to know how Mithril.js compares to other frameworks, see the framework comparison page. An easy way to try out Mithril.js is to include it from a CDN and follow this tutorial. It'll cover the majority of the API surface (including routing and XHR) but it'll only take 10 minutes. You can now update the label of the button by clicking the button. Since we used m.mount, you don't need to manually call m.render to apply the changes in the count variable to the HTML; Mithril.js does it for you.

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Starting Price: Free

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.NET MAUI

Microsoft

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is a framework for building modern, multi-platform, natively compiled iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows apps using C# and XAML in a single codebase. .NET MAUI uses the latest, modern technologies for building native apps on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows abstracting them into one common framework built on .NET 6. Native apps look and feel like the operating system on which they belong by default and layouts are fully adapted to each device automatically with no additional code. Platform APIs are available directly from C# to access over 60 platform features from a single cross-platform API including access to things like isolated storage, sensors, geolocation, camera, and a whole lot more with no compromises.

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Starting Price: Free

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Angular

Learn one way to build applications with Angular and reuse your code and abilities to build apps for any deployment target. For web, mobile web, native mobile and native desktop. Achieve the maximum speed possible on the Web Platform today, and take it further, via Web Workers and server-side rendering. Angular puts you in control over scalability. Meet huge data requirements by building data models on RxJS, Immutable.js or another push-model. Build features quickly with simple, declarative templates. Extend the template language with your own components and use a wide array of existing components. Get immediate Angular-specific help and feedback with nearly every IDE and editor. All this comes together so you can focus on building amazing apps rather than trying to make the code work. From prototype through global deployment, Angular delivers the productivity and scalable infrastructure that supports Google's largest applications.

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Starting Price: Free

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Vue.js

Builds on top of standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript with intuitive API and world-class documentation. Truly reactive, compiler-optimized rendering system that rarely requires manual optimization. A rich, incrementally adoptable ecosystem that scales between a library and a full-featured framework. Vue is a JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. It builds on top of standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and provides a declarative and component-based programming model that helps you efficiently develop user interfaces, be it simple or complex. Vue extends standard HTML with a template syntax that allows us to declaratively describe HTML output based on JavaScript state. Vue automatically tracks JavaScript state changes and efficiently updates the DOM when changes happen. Vue is a framework and ecosystem that covers most of the common features needed in frontend development.

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jQuery Mobile

OpenJS Foundation

jQuery Mobile is an HTML5-based user interface system designed to make responsive websites and apps that are accessible on all smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. jQuery Mobile framework takes the "write less, do more" mantra to the next level: Instead of writing unique applications for each mobile device or OS, the jQuery mobile framework allows you to design a single highly-branded responsive website or application that will work on all popular smartphone, tablet, and desktop platforms. We believe that your website or app should feel like your brand, not any particular OS. To make building highly customized themes easy, we've created ThemeRoller for mobile to make it easy to drag and drop colors and download a custom theme. For polished visuals without the bloat, we leverage CSS3 properties. We recommend using our tool to build a custom bundle that contains only the components you need.

Starting Price: Free

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Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is a mobile UI framework just like Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. If you know Angular JS and Twitter Bootstrap you already know it! Mobile Angular UI provides essential mobile components that are missing in Bootstrap 3, switches, overlays, sidebars, scrollable areas, and absolute positioned top and bottom navbars that don't bounce on scroll. It relies on robust libraries like fastclick.js and overthrow.js to achieve a better mobile experience. No jQuery dependencies, no fat bootstrap js. Just a few angular.js directives are super easy to learn to put things together. Mobile Angular UI retains most of the Bootstrap 3 syntax. This way it’s trivial to bring an existing desktop web app to mobile. Also, a super-small CSS file is provided to do the opposite. Just include it and you’ll get a fully responsive and touch-enabled interface that can be used everywhere. FontAwesome Icons are included by default in place of Glyphicons.

Starting Price: Free

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Svelte Native

Svelte Native is a mobile application framework powered by Svelte, build mobile apps using the friendly web framework you already know. Build cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps without web views. Get truly native UI and performance while sharing skills and code with the web. Use the full power of Svelte including transitions, stores, and reactivity. One of the smoothest development experiences available for mobile. Svelte Native is a new approach to building mobile applications using NativeScript. Where other JavaScript mobile development frameworks like React Native and NativeScript-Vue do the bulk of their work on the mobile device, Svelte Native shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app. Instead of using techniques like virtual DOM diffing, Svelte writes code that surgically updates the native view widgets when the state of your app changes.

Starting Price: Free

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Framework7

Framework7 is a free and open-source framework to develop mobile, desktop, or web apps with a native look and feel. It is also an indispensable prototyping tool to show a working app prototype as soon as possible in case you need to. With such a stunning set of UI components that Framework7 provides right from the box, it allows to create web apps, progressive web apps (PWA), and iOS and Android apps with a native look and feel. Framework7 paired with extra tools like Electron and NW.js allows to build native desktop apps. You can use any tools you love when working with Framework7. It doesn’t force you to use anything except plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Creating apps with Framework7 is easy as creating a website. And in addition to vanilla JavaScript library, Framework7 comes with Vue.js, React, and Svelte components to bring components-syntax, structured data, and data bindings with the power and simplicity of Vue.js, React, or Svelte.

Starting Price: Free

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Koa

Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. By leveraging async functions, Koa allows you to ditch callbacks and greatly increase error handling. Koa does not bundle any middleware within its core, and it provides an elegant suite of methods that make writing servers fast and enjoyable. A Koa application is an object containing an array of middleware functions that are composed and executed in a stack-like manner upon request. Koa is similar to many other middleware systems that you may have encountered such as Ruby's Rack, Connect, and so on - however, a key design decision was made to provide high-level "sugar" at the otherwise low-level middleware layer. This improves interoperability, and robustness, and makes writing middleware much more enjoyable.

Starting Price: Free

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UIkit

Create websites on the fly with the drag and drop page builder. It generates perfect UIkit markup, tailored for your needs. Customize every aspect of UIkit visually, build and arrange your content, all in one comprehensive and intuitive interface. Build pages with ready-to-use elements made from UIkit components, like buttons, cards, accordions and much more. Modify the visual appearance of your site – including colors, fonts, margins and other style-related properties – with a sophisticated style customizer for UIkit.

Starting Price: Free

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NativeScript

Improve OSS repository management using multiple monorepo setups. Improved onboarding: tutorials for all flavors, linked from the home page. Improved Dialog handling with core-provided abstract APIs. Core: split out architectural level packages for advanced use-cases and scalability. This page will walk through installing everything you need to build your first NativeScript app. Setting up the Android development environment can be daunting if you are new to Android development, however following the next steps carefully will get you up and running in no time. Setting up the Android development environment can be daunting if you are new to Android development, however following the next steps carefully will get you up and running in no time.

Starting Price: Free

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Sencha Ext JS

Sencha

Sencha Ext JS is a comprehensive JavaScript application framework for building feature-rich, cross-browser-compatible web and mobile applications. It includes a library with 140+ high-performance customizable components, a set of tools and a powerful UI Framework. Key Features Rich UI Components – Includes a variety of pre-built UI elements such as grids and trees, menus and toolbars, forms and buttons, etc. Cross-platform compatibility - Supports major desktop and mobile web browsers including IE Firefox Chrome Safari and Opera. Data Packages – Includes data components to interact with various data sources including JSON, XML and database connections. Theming and Skinning - Allow easy skinning and theming of the UI with CSS. Development Tools - Includes an extensive set of development tools including a visual designer and debugger. Large Community - Has an active and large community of developers who provide support, extensions, etc.

Starting Price: $1,295 one-time payment

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QUnit

The powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript testing framework. Easy, zero-configuration setup for any Node.js project and minimal configuration for browser-based projects. Tests can be run anywhere; Node, your browser, even inside a web worker. Test your code where it runs. Flexible APIs for custom assertions, runners, and reporters mean you can extend QUnit to fit your needs. Getting started with QUnit for Node.js projects is quick and easy. First, install the QUnit package using npm. You can now run the test suite through the QUnit CLI. It is recommended that you run the QUnit command via an npm script, which will find the QUnit command automatically from your local dependencies. Check out the API documentation to learn more about the QUnit APIs for organizing tests and making assertions.QUnit follows the Node.js Long-term Support (LTS) schedule and provides support for current, active LTS, and maintenance LTS releases.

Starting Price: Free

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Mocha

Mocha runs in the browser. Every release of Mocha will have new builds of ./mocha.js and ./mocha.css for use in the browser. By adding an argument (usually named done) to it() to a test callback, Mocha will know that it should wait for this function to be called to complete the test. This callback accepts both an Error instance (or subclass thereof) or a falsy value; anything else is invalid usage and throws an error (usually causing a failed test). These reporters expect Mocha to know how many tests it plans to run before execution. This information is unavailable in parallel mode, as test files are loaded only when they are about to be run. In serial mode, tests results will “stream” as they occur. In parallel mode, reporter output is buffered; reporting will occur after each file is completed. In practice, the reporter output will appear in “chunks” (but will otherwise be identical). If a test file is particularly slow, there may be a significant pause while it’s running.

Starting Price: Free

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Sails

Build practical, production-ready Node.js apps in a matter of weeks, not months. Sails is the most popular MVC framework for Node.js, designed to emulate the familiar MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps, data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture. Sails makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. Building on top of Sails means your app is written entirely in JavaScript, the language you and your team are already using in the browser. Sails bundles a powerful ORM, Waterline, which provides a simple data access layer that just works, no matter what database you're using. Sails comes with blueprints that help jumpstart your app's backend without writing any code. Since Sails translates incoming socket messages for you, they're automatically compatible with every route in your Sails app. Sails offers commercial support to accelerate development and ensure best practices in your code.

Starting Price: Free

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Avalonia UI

Avalonia UI enables developers to create multi-platform apps with .NET. Write once, and run everywhere. Save time and focus on your product. Considered a spiritual successor to WPF, Avalonia UI provides a familiar developer experience, allowing you to leverage years of pre-existing knowledge and investments. rusted by JetBrains as the best framework for modernizing their WPF-based tools, used by >170,000 companies, including 431 on the Fortune 500 list. Our developer community has grown enormously as Avalonia UI has grown in popularity. Join us and be welcomed into our supportive and vibrant community.

Starting Price: Free

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SwiftUI

Apple

SwiftUI helps you build great-looking apps across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift — and surprisingly little code. You can bring even better experiences to everyone, on any Apple device, using just one set of tools and APIs. Build sophisticated animations with expanded animation support. Use phases to create sequences of animations, or create multiple animation tracks using keyframes. SwiftUI automatically transfers the velocity of a user gesture to your animations so your app feels fluid and natural. Share more of your SwiftUI code with your watchOS apps. Scroll vertical TabViews using the crown, match colors with adaptive background containers, take advantage of edge-to-edge displays with new ToolbarItem placements, and leverage NavigationSplitView to build detailed list views.

Starting Price: Free

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Corona

Corona Labs

Select from numerous plugins which extend the Corona core for features like in-app advertising, analytics, media, and much more. Develop for mobile, desktop, and connected TV devices with just one code base. Corona speeds up the development process. Update your code, save the changes, and instantly see the results in our instant-update Simulator. When you're ready to test on real devices, build and deploy your app just once and then see code/assets update automatically, all over your local network. It's like magic. From bleeding-fast OpenGL graphics to the lightweight scripting power of Lua, Corona is optimized for performance at every core level. With Corona, your apps are automatically compiled at build time, streamlined for performance and stability. Corona's source code is now open for developers to add features to that they need and even contribute back to the core product.

Starting Price: Free

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Aurelia

Aurelia's standards-based, unobtrusive style makes it the only framework that empowers you to build components using vanilla JavaScript or TypeScript. If you know modern JS and HTML, there's little more to learn to build even the most complex apps. At the core of Aurelia is a high-performance, reactive system, capable of batching DOM updates in a way that leaves other frameworks, and their virtual DOMs, in the dust. Experience consistent, scalable performance, no matter how complex your UI. Aurelia enables powerful reactive binding to any object. By using adaptive techniques Aurelia selects the most efficient way to observe each property in your model and automatically syncs your UI and your state with best-in-class performance. State management, internationalization and validation - all official plugins from the core team. CLI, VS Code plugin, and Chrome debugger - optional tools to enhance development.

Starting Price: Free

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Wisej.NET

Ice Tea Group

Wisej.NET provides a platform and set of tools designed to ease the burden of developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining complex AI-powered business software. It bridges the gap between traditional WinForms-style desktop applications and the web by empowering developers to leverage their existing .NET and C# or VB.NET) skills. Developers are able to use the tools they are familiar with, like a pixel-perfect design surface and drag-and-drop controls with the languages they are comfortable with (C# or VB.NET) to build real-time web applications without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. They can stay in their favorite IDE like Visual Studio to take advantage of features like IntelliSense, integrated debugging, design surfaces and source control integration. Front-end developers can leverage their knowledge of web technologies to augment applications and seamlessly integrate third-party packages like HTML5 charting libraries and ASP.NET controls.

Starting Price: $990

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Xamarin

Microsoft

Free. Cross-platform. Open source. An app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#. Use .NET and C# to create native apps for the billions of Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows devices around the world. Add to that sharing code with any .NET app, empowering you to be more productive and build apps faster than ever across all platforms. Ready to take code sharing to the next level? Xamarin.Forms is an open source mobile UI framework from Microsoft for building iOS, Android, & Windows apps with .NET from a single shared codebase. Whether you want a consistent look across platforms or prefer native look and feel, Xamarin.Forms will get you up and running in no time. .NET is a developer platform made up of tools, programming languages, and libraries for building many different types of applications. Xamarin extends the .NET developer platform with tools and libraries specifically for building apps for Android, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS, and Windows.

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Meteor

Meteor is an open-source framework for seamlessly building and deploying Web, Mobile, and Desktop applications in Javascript. Use popular frameworks and tools right out of the box. Focus on building features instead of configuring disparate components yourself. Use the same code whether you’re developing for web, iOS, Android, or desktop for a seamless update experience for your users. Developed for over a decade and trusted by industry giants. Meteor is a mature open-source framework that allows you to build and scale efficiently so you can serve millions of users. Visibility into your app's performance. See real-time metrics so you can monitor how your application is running. Spend less time on DevOps and more time building. The most efficient way for you to host & scale your Meteor app. Browse our extensive library of open source packages, free for you to download.

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Core ML

Apple

Core ML applies a machine learning algorithm to a set of training data to create a model. You use a model to make predictions based on new input data. Models can accomplish a wide variety of tasks that would be difficult or impractical to write in code. For example, you can train a model to categorize photos or detect specific objects within a photo directly from its pixels. After you create the model, integrate it in your app and deploy it on the user’s device. Your app uses Core ML APIs and user data to make predictions and to train or fine-tune the model. You can build and train a model with the Create ML app bundled with Xcode. Models trained using Create ML are in the Core ML model format and are ready to use in your app. Alternatively, you can use a wide variety of other machine learning libraries and then use Core ML Tools to convert the model into the Core ML format. Once a model is on a user’s device, you can use Core ML to retrain or fine-tune it on-device.

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Compare the Top Development Frameworks for iPhone as of April 2025

What are Development Frameworks for iPhone?

React Native