
To state the obvious, Android and iOS are the two most used mobile operating system currently in the world.
Now, if you look at worldwide usage of mobile operating systems in the following chart, Android rules drastically. The total worldwide market share of Android is close to 75% compared to iOS at 20% currently.
Every other operating system is excluded.


Obviously, there are a lot of other programming languages to build mobile apps for each of these platforms. And it doesn't even make sense to mention other operating systems as they don't matter.
The following list is the top 5 of the best programming languages for mobile app development
- Java
- Objective-C
- Swift
- Kotlin
- React Native
Java
Objective-C
Objective-C was originally developed by Tom Love and Brad Cox way back in 1984. Prior to Apple launching the Swift language in 2014, Objective-C was the primary language of the Apple iOS mobile apps.
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented language that brings Smalltalk flavor to C programming language. Message passing among objects is a key feature in Objective-C and it quickly became really useful for Apple iOS operating system.
But, Swift has taken over Objective-C in popularity and usefulness.
Swift
Kotlin
React Native
“Learn once, write anywhere”.
React is an open-source framework produced by Facebook. Launched in 2013, it enables developers to create high-level web User Interfaces in JavaScript, based on reusable visual components (e.g. a custom blue Message
bubble including text content and timestamp in a chat). It can manage data changes over time without reloading the page.
React Native was also produced by Facebook. Announced 2 years later, it continues and brings the power of its older brother React to the mobile world. It is your mobile application that you will be able to write in JavaScript. The elements you manage wrap iOS and Android native relatable elements into one single React Native object, exposing a unified API (e.g. the React NativescrollView
element is bridged into UIScrollView
in iOS and ListView
in Android).
Because React Native is developed on top React, and because they both rely on the same language, it makes it feasible for them to collaborate exceedingly in as varied areas as business logic and back-end integration for example. This means that past the aforementioned unification between iOS and Android offered by React Native, a bridge can now be produced between Web and Mobile.

Jessica Bingham writes articles for businesses that want to see their product to be well-known. Her articles have appeared in a number of e-zine sites, including EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, HubPages.com and TRCB.com.