Category: Native App Development

What is the ultimate app development technology stack? Of all the tools we’ve found, the following gives the most flexibility. But first let’s give some of our judging requirements.

Requirements

1. Ease of setup
2. Low maintenance
3. Cost (for hosting, and additional development)
4. Flexibility
5. Scalability
6. Portability (able to use on other hosts, and not be locked in)
7. Extensibility (Modularity and open source with standards)
8. SEO (so people can find your site)
9. Reusability (able to use for other purposes)
10. Automatable
11. Community (documentation and people to answer questions)

The Stack

Here are our top choices for the ultimate technology stacks, that bring the most benefits and flexibility for the least amount of cost:

• Ionic Angular
  • JavaScript/TypeScript
    • Most prolific coding language
  • Same codebase can build web app (PWA) and native apps (Android and iOS)
  • Capacitor for native code
    • Same API for web and native
  • Stencil for web components
    • More performant than React
  • Automatable with AppFlow CI/CD
• Netlify
  • Automatically compiles frontend code directly from repo
  • Great for PWA code assets
  • Free starter plan with 100GB traffic
• WordPress
  • Backend API for app
  • Most prolific CMS
    • High availability of developers
  • Lots of plugins available for fast extensibility
  • Plugins
    • PODs for taxonomies
    • Google Site Kit
      • Easy analytics setup
    • WPide turns WordPress itself into a code editor (IDE), with revision history!
• Fastest Hosting
  • Starter hosting:
    • AccelerHosting
      • cPanel Accelerated
      • Fast inexpensive hosting
      • Unlimited sites
        • Can find out which sites perform well before upgrading their hosting
      • Built in CloudFlare access
  • Growth hosting:
    • When traffic gets too big can switch to one of the following
      • AWS Lightsail
        • Inexpensive and scalable, but for autoscaling you have to move to EC2
      • Google Cloud
        • Free starter tier, but is very limited
• Firebase Cloud Messaging
  • Push notifications
  • Free starter tier
• CloudFlare
  • Worldwide high speed CDN
  • Access with WordPress plugin
    • WP CloudFlare Super Page Cache
• Google App Scripts
  • Automated content updates from spreadsheets
  • Can pull small bits of content from feeds for automated updates
• Google Data Studio
  • Dashboard for multiple sites
• Visual Studio Code
  • Awesome code editor with our favorite extensions

Have some other tech stack suggestions? Please drop a comment below.