The Most Popular Non-Native Framework Isn't React Native (or Flutter)

Last week I shared a surprising insight about React Native that generated a lot of feedback. Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts, questions, and suggestions for what I should be looking at for the full report.

While I compile that, I have a bit more to share that should address the most common question I've been getting which was "Is React Native shrinking because another framework is taking over", and "is that framework Flutter?".

Before we answer those two questions, let's have a quick look at where we stand today in terms of popularity of non-native frameworks.

For that, I rounded up the top 5 frameworks by usage in iOS and Android apps, I grabbed that from Explorer, which is an excellent resource for SDK intelligence. If you've looked at Explorer and weren't sure where to start, I've been thinking of doing a live stream on how I use it for the newsletter. If you'd like that let me know.

Contrary to common belief, React Native isn't the most popular non-native framework for mobile apps... React native, while very powerful, has a very steep learning curve. And I speak from experience. I do expect that to improve over time, but it's facing stiff competition from other frameworks and also directly from Apple and Google that are simplifying development.

The most popular non-native framework is Unity right now.

According to our data, nearly 270K apps and games, mostly games, that are available in the stores now, were built with Unity. There are roughly 755K games across the App Store and Google Play, which means Unity is powering about a third of all mobile games.

Cordova is a very close second, with a smidge over 260K apps and games, mostly apps, using it right now. Cordova is very different from Unity so there's no overlap here. They also don't compete because Unity is for games while Cordova is for simpler applications.

React Native comes in third, and not that close followed by Flutter, which is closer.

Ionic, which is mainly for apps, comes last in the list with a little more than 130K apps and games. It's about half of its nearest "competitor", but that aside, it's powering an impressive number of apps right now.

Now that we know where we are right now we can turn to "how did we get here?".

For that, I pulled the number of apps released by year having each of these frameworks. These numbers include all apps released during the year, including ones that may have been removed for any reason, so they won't exactly align with the numbers we just looked it.

Looking at this chart, the trend of "less non-native" is apparent across the board. All five frameworks saw fewer apps released in 2022 when compared to 2021. However... not all saw the same drop.

When comparing the rate of growth, or, shrinkage in this case, React Native, again, wasn't at the top of the list. That's at least good.

Ionic and Cordova saw the biggest drop in 2022. Given Ionic works on top of Cordova that makes perfect sense.

At the other end of the list is Flutter, which dropped the least of all five in 2022, just 19% year over year. Flutter seems to have hit the mainstream in 2021 growing a lot over 2020. Having never used Flutter and only hearing developers complain about it Im not sure why it's seeing more adoption these days, but then I looked at some of the apps that are built with it and couldn't really find many interesting/popular titles.

More in the full report, and if there's something specific you'd like me to include let me know.