In 2021, the mobile app development tools market size was worth $ 197 billion. Within the next decade, this financial potential may be thrice as much, according to projections by Straits Research. It’s quite clear that the mobile app industry is a lucrative one. Uncertainty, however, hovers over which are the best mobile app development tools to use. Choosing the right tools is key to avoiding reinventing the wheel and instead hastening turnaround and efficiency.
List of Mobile App Development Tools for Developers
Here are some of the top tools recommended by our mobile app development agency that is certain to take your developer workflow to the next level.
Justinmind
It’s a good best practice for mobile app development that before you get down to any coding, you need to first come up with a wireframe. In the past, developers could sketch prototypes by hand or using graphic tools such as Canva or Photoshop.
Today, the savvy mobile app developer is leveraging exclusive wireframe and prototyping tools, chief among them: Justinmind. This tool allows you to:
- Get a clear road map of your app layout from the get-go
- Break down and understand your interface & its features better
- Improve design iteration to save you time and possibly money
- Easily make changes on the fly
And the best part about Justinmind, is it has ready templates that you can experiment with, combining different ideas into one seamless vision. If you’re building a complex app with many different parts, its drag-and-drop UI makes it easy to bring your ideas to life before you write a single line of code.
Nifty
Well, Nifty is technically a project management tool built specifically for software developers. But it becomes a valuable asset more so if you’re working on a complex project with multiple team members.
To ensure everyone’s on the same page and to avoid development over lapses, Nifty is a great project management tool to have. Here’s what you can do with it as a mobile app developer:
- Plan and allocate resources to your development team
- Determine risks early & track them through the project cycle
- Simultaneously communicate with team members in one place
The highlight of Nifty is that it allows the automation of progress reports to pass on to your clients, and features a calendar that offers Outlook and Google integration.
PaintCode
What if you could design visual elements, and then get the code for the components you graphically created? Coding apps normally works the other way around, but PaintCode is flipping normalcy.
For example, say you want to design a new button or icon for your app. You can draw it up on PaintCode, or choose from existing templates. Afterward, this tool will then generate the accompanying code for that visual in a variety of languages, namely:
- JavaScript
- C#
- Java
- Objective-C
- Swift
Pretty cool right? Essentially, PaintCode eliminates the divide that lies between graphic design and coding.
Fastlane
In the conventional way of going about app deployment, things aren’t always efficient and require a ton of human effort. When you need to release newer versions of your app, there are a lot of manual processes:
- Creating app screenshots according to various device makes
- Manually revising your app’s screenshots and metadata
- Publishing these builds to individual testers & stores
When you regularly update your app, the work begins to pile up. And when you execute a lot of these interventions manually, the probability of slipups also goes up as well.
Fastlane offers automation for these tasks and also comes with compatibility with mainstream CI/CD solutions such as TravisCI and Jenkins. It’s completely customizable and, being open source, this is certainly one of the top app development tools, particularly for large development teams. For the lone developer, it may be overkill.
Appium
Over 75% of consumers spare great thought to an app’s potential performance before they seal the deal. Additionally, for every 7 out of 10 apps that get shown the door, the top reasons are app crashes. These statistics state just how important it is to be thorough with your testing. There’s no room for error.
But app testing can be quite the uphill task in light of the different operating systems, varying device screen sizes, and volatile user requirements, among other factors, that developers have to deal with. However, as always, the key to easing app development lies in automation tools.
Appium is a test automation framework that can take several tasks off your plate, and generally offers:
- Multi-language support (Python, PHP, Ruby, you name it)
- Cross-platform testing (be the apps hybrid, web, or native)
- Automated plug & play tests for mobile applications
A more popular and equally worthy alternative to Appium is Selenium.
The Right Tools Will Save You Time, Headaches & Money!
It’s super important that every developer leverages the right app development tools. These can help to reduce both the burden on financial and time resources. Aside from speeding up development, our mobile app development agency also finds that these tools can trim the cost of app building. You won’t have to make a compromise between slashing features and sticking to a budget. What developer tools do you use to make your work easier? We’d love to hear from you so let us know!
