Cross-platform Application Frameworks

This post lists some cross-platform application frameworks for desktop and mobile applications.

List of cross-platform application frameworks

Cross-platform application frameworks featured on this post:

  • .NET
  • Flutter
  • Ionic
  • Unity
  • React Native
  • Apache Cordova
  • Qt
  • Appcelerator Titanium

.NET

CLI or .NET implementations allow to create cross-platform apps from different programming languages.

Popular .NET implementations are .NET (formerly known as .NET Core) and Xamarin family of implementations (Mono, Xamarin.macOS, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS).

CLI was defined by Microsoft, and .NET implementations .NET Core and Xamarin are also developed by Microsoft.

To get a deeper understanding of .NET frameworks, you can check this post.

Official web

Flutter

Flutter is used to develop cross platform applications for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia and the web.

It was originally focused on mobile OSs, and then expanded to desktop OS. Flutter for Web allows compatibility with web, and is the less mature of all compatibilities.

It is developed by Google and other communities.

Flutter uses the Dart programming language.

Official web

Flutter at Wikipedia

Ionic

Mobile app framework for mobile OS.

It is free and open-source (FOSS). It is developed by company Drifty.

The framework uses JavaScript.

Official web

Ionic at Wikipedia

Unity

Unity is a cross-platform game engine framework for computer, consoles and video-games.

It is developed by Unity, a company based in the USA.

The framework uses C#.

Official web

Unity at Wikipedia

React Native

React Native is a framework to develop cross-platform mobile apps that work on both Android and iOS OSs.

React Native apps are based on JavaScript programming language.

It is free and open source (FOSS), under an MIT license.

Do not confuse the React Native cross-platform mobile framework with the React web front-end framework.

Official web

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova, also known as PhoneGap, is a development framework for mobile phones based on web technologies.

It is free and open source (FOSS), under an Apache License 2.0.

Official web

Qt

The framework uses C++.

It is free and open source (FOSS), under a GPLv2, GPLv3 and LGPL licenses.

Official web

Appcelerator Titanium

Since 2021, the project is supported by the community. Before, the French company Axway maintained it until it discontinued the project and made the source code available at GitHub.

Official web

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