Last year, we decided to implement a mobile app for our team. As it’s an internal app, native performance wasn’t our first priority. Our goal was to deliver it as soon as possible with minimum maintenance. Here are the few comparisons why we chose Hybrid over Native framework.

Hybrid vs Native app

There are so many hybrid mobile frameworks such as Ionic, NativeScript, React Native, Xamarin, PhoneGap etc. We decided to evaluate top 2 hybrid frameworks — Ionic and React Native

Ionic vs React Native

Our team was familiar with technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java etc. and had no experience with React. Ionic rich pre-built components, typescript simplicity and vast support of platforms convinced us to go with it for our mobile app.

Ionic Overview

Ionic is the only mobile app stack that enables web developers to build apps for all major app stores and the mobile web with a single code base. And with Ionic’s Platform Continuity, your app looks and feels at home on every device. Ionic community has developed more than 4M ionic apps.

Free & Open Source — 100% source code on Github

Fully Cross-Platform — IOS, Android, Windows, Web, Desktop, PWA

Premier Native Plugins — Camera, Bluetooth, Push Notifications

First-class Documentation — Clear and Consistent

Ionic 2 is based on Angular 2 which is based on TypeScript. Typescript is a typed superset of Javascript that compiles to plain JavaScript. Angular 2 is the successor of the overwhelmingly successful Angular.js framework. Angular 2 is faster than Angular 1 and offers a much more flexible and modular development approach.

Progressive Web Apps(PWA) — The mobile future

Progressive Web Apps bring features we expect from native apps to the mobile browser experience. Ionic apps enable developers to get the best of both worlds: cross-platform app store deployment on iOS, Android, and Windows, along with deployment to the mobile web as a Progressive Web App with the same code. See this amazing video to see power of PWA- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTaDhwJDLg

Ionic Performance

We deployed our in iOS platform

Boot up time is as fast as native iOS app

App transitions are very smooth even with graphs drawn using highcharts

To see Ionic performance, I created a basic weather app https://aggarwalankush.github.io/ionic-mosum/

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Some good references