What is a Hybrid Mobile App? Best Hybrid Mobile App UI Frameworks?

What is a hybrid mobile app?

Hybrid Mobile Applications. Hybrid development combines the best (or worst) of both the native and HTML5 worlds. We define hybrid as a web app, primarily built using HTML5 and JavaScript, that is then wrapped inside a thin native container that provides access to native platform features.

Hybrid application features:

1. Can function whether or not the device is connected. 
2. Integration with a device’s file system.  
3. Integration  with Web-based services. 
4. An embedded browser to improve access to dynamic online content.

Best Hybrid Mobile App UI Frameworks :-

1. Ionic 

Ionic is a powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Ionic is focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app. That means we aren't a replacement for PhoneGap or your favourite Javascript framework. Instead, Ionic simply fits in well with these projects in order to simplify one big part of your app: the front end. We recommend reading Where does the Ionic Framework fit in? to get a good understanding of Ionic's goals.

2. React Native

With React Native, you don't build a "mobile web app", an "HTML5 app", or a "hybrid app". You build a real mobile app that's indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java. React Native uses the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps. You just put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React.

3. PhoneGap

PhoneGap is the odd one out in this list as it’s not a framework for creating an app, but for packaging and releasing an app. PhoneGap is based on the open source Cordova and is the commercial version owned by Adobe. With a dedicated support team, PhoneGap is popular amongst many mobile developers.

4. JQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile is the easiest way to build sites and apps that are accessible on all popular smartphone, tablet, and desktop devices. This framework provides a set of touch-friendly UI widgets and an AJAX-powered navigation system to support animated page transitions.

5. Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI lets you create HTML5 hybrid mobile apps and desktop apps with twitter Bootstrap and Angular JS.

6. Onsen UI

Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca IDE - cloud-based IDE for Cordova.

7. Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch is the leading MVC-based JavaScript framework for building cross-platform mobile web applications. Sencha Touch leverages hardware acceleration techniques to provide high-performance UI components for mobile devices.

8. Intel XDK

The App Framework JavaScript library is a blazingly fast cross-platform UI library built for mobile HTML5 apps. The UI styles in this library are designed to easily adapt to your target platform (Google Android*, Apple iOS*, Microsoft Windows* 8, and new RIM Blackberry* devices) so you can give your application a target-specific look and feel. 

9. Kendo UI

Kendo UI is an HTML5 user interface framework for building interactive and high-performance websites and applications. The framework comes with a library of 70+ UI widgets, an abundance of data-visualization gadgets, client-side data source, built-in MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) library. Kendo UI provides AngularJS and Bootstrap integration.

10. Framework 7

Framework7 - is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS & Android native look and feel. It is also an indispensable prototyping apps tool to show working app prototype as soon as possible in case you need to.

11. Famo.us

The Famous Framework is a new JavaScript framework for creating reusable, composable, and interchangeable UI widgets and applications. It balances declarative with imperative and functional with stateful, and it's built on top of the Famous Engine. We are excited to make it available as open source under an MIT license for the first time as part of a public alpha.

12. Monaca

Monaca makes the hybrid mobile app development process with PhoneGap/Cordova simpler and stress-free with our comprehensive cloud-powered app development tools and services. Monaca is framework-agnostic and adaptive, ready to be immediately plugged into your existing workflow and dev environment, creating the most open Cordova platform available.

13. Appium

Appium is an open-source tool for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS and Android platforms. Native apps are those written using the iOS or Android SDKs. Mobile web apps are web apps accessed using a mobile browser (Appium supports Safari on iOS and Chrome or the built-in 'Browser' app on Android). Hybrid apps have a wrapper around a "webview" -- a native control that enables interaction with web content. Projects like Phonegap, make it easy to build apps using web technologies that are then bundled into a native wrapper, creating a hybrid app.