Differences between Native Script and react native and ionic framework

Question

Both Native Script and ionic framework are used for build IOS and Android apps with web view & without web views respectively.

I have a confusion between the concept of web view and without web view in above technologies.

What are the key difference between Native Script and ionic framework. Which one gives best performance ?

Can any one explain this or provide some related stuff.

(Please correct me if my understanding is wrong)

Answer 1

For faster learning curve and better segregation of the code go for Nativescript

if your app is big, critical and need some performance go for React Native

It doesn't mean that you can't create big apps with Nativescript but it's a fact that none of the pioneer used Nativescript in their production.

I almost always got orders for small applications and I use Nativescript a lot. And I usually took one week or two to finish an app.

I'm also working on React Native in a team of 10. And because of lot of factors like performance, reuse ability, stability and segregation of code concern. From past 6 months the app was not yet finished as it has some learning curve.

but I confidently say if your app is small and want to deliver it quickly and the budget is small go for Nativescript.

And if you know Nativescript learning react is easier and vice-versa.

My point of view

The architecture of Nativescript is So awesome. But ReactNative is so famous and gives better performance only because it's name "facebook developers developed this". So, of course it became popular and people started using it and made it more popular mean time they improved it. If facebook people have developed Nativescript then no one even think to touch ReactNative.

I prefer someone to develop a cross platform technology, which is a combination of Nativescript's Architecture and ReactNative's Component reuse ability feature.

Answer 2

I have worked on both react native and native script and developed some of the application on both during a span of 8 months.Ionic is something I have to try.So I would share my experience using react native and nativescript.

There are both pros and cons with react native and nativescript.It depends on the user requirement of the application on which mainly your choice is made.

For example: When I had the application that was to be build more targeted towards the iOS and had basically required the view rendering to be fast and not that much of data handling I went for the react native.

On the other hand application was to be firs build for android and than for iOS, I opted for native script because it has better support for android as compared to react native.The main advantage you can take with nativescript is of the angular-2 data binding approach which lessen ups the work that is not there in react native.

The community of react native is very huge than nativescript and its growing at a better pace, but I found community of native script more helpful.

Here is the general description of all taken from there respective official site

REACT NATIVE

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.With React Native, you don't build a “mobile web app”, an “HTML5 app”, or a “hybrid app”. You build a real mobile app that's indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java. React Native uses the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps. You just put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React.

NATIVESCRIPT

NativeScript is how you build cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps without web views. Use Angular, TypeScript or modern JavaScript to get truly native UI and performance while sharing skills and code with the web. Get 100% access to native APIs via JavaScript and reuse of packages from NPM, CocoaPods and Gradle. Open source and backed by Telerik.

IONIC

Ionic framework is an open-source SDK for developing mobile apps. As it is based on AngularJS and Apache Cordova, Ionic enables building hybrid apps rather than separate ones for iOS and Android.It has fairly good documentation and tutorials. Also just knowing basic Javascript and HTML will get you started.

Answer 3

The important difference is that native applications are developed specifically for the particular platform (for example, iOS for the iPhone, Android OS for Android or Windows for Windows Phone, etc.) and require the developer to have specialized knowledge and skills to work in a certain development environment (Xcode for iOS, Eclipse for Android, Visual Studio for Windows Phone). Each platform uses its own programming language (Objective C or Swift for iOS, Java for Android, C# for Windows Phone).

On the other hand, a hybrid app runs on all the devices due to its cross-platform feature. The most popular framework for the hybrid app development is PhoneGap.

However, I strongly recommend developing the native app despite its complexity, because the native apps have better performance provide a better user experience.

The more details about the native app and the hybrid app peculiarities, development process, etc, you can find in this useful article: http://computoolsglobal.com/blog/native-app-vs-hybrid-app/

Answer 4

Nativescript (similar to React-Native) allows you to develop a mobile application in Javascript and XML (or JSX). These frameworks allow you to generate a native mobile application. The UI uses native components from the platform to create a performant slick interface. The Javascript logic code runs inside a JS engine (V8 for Android) bundled with the application. This has the downside of making the app pretty large but you can make cross platform, highly performant mobile apps. The JS code can also access phone functionality through bridging code in the framework.

PhoneGap/Cordova hybrid apps are web apps that get installed onto the phone like a native app but they run inside a WebView. Cordova is used to access the phone hardware functionality. The UI is not native it's just a web page so you can get performance issues (especially on older phones) and graphical stutters if your app is complex.

Ionic2 is probably the best example of a hybrid framework and it goes a long way to overcome the performance issues but it can be a struggle to get good examples/tutorials for it since it is very new and breaks a lot of stuff from Ionic1. Searching for examples brings up a lot of code that no longer works. Hybrid apps will often look similar on all platforms since they do not use native UI components. Some people prefer iPhone apps to look like iPhone apps and not a web app.