Ionic vs. NativeScript vs. Xamarin

- Inexpensively and rapidly creating multi-device (Android, iPhone) native apps. - Quick ramp-up time allows for rapid development. - Open source tools can be used to develop. - Lightweight code-based can be easily shared and developed in a team environment. - Use of React, Vue, and angular leverages well-known coding and application design frameworks that are transportable.

Incentivized

I gotta be honest, after a PoC period, we choose to rewrite the whole application in a different cross-platform app. Our developers had to invest a lot of time and effort to debug a lot of plugin-related issues, which we needed to utilize the android mobile phone capabilities. QR reader, special visualizations, and fine-tuning were really hard and often resulted in writing native Android code instead of using the shared Angular code. In the end, we think that writing a standalone Android app and an Angular app would have been a better alternative, as the shared code base was so unreliable that it did not save us any time.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.

Incentivized

• Nice command line interface for repetitive development and deployment tasks.
• Realtime preview (in web browser) during development.
• Easy to update and keep current (open source) via command line.
• Provides nice set of mobile widgets for consistency across devices.

Incentivized

• True native app. The app uses native components and that is quite noticeable in the overall performance of the app. NativeScript is also awesome in the way we can access the native APIs, so we are never really constrained by the framework. If we need, we can just dive into the native APIs without leaving our environment and language (JS).
• Cross-platform. Builds for Android and iOS. It deals with the platforms differences very well.
• Support for Vue.js. Even though it is just a community effort, the NativeScript-Vue plugin is the best alternative to build native Apps with Vue.js. That was a major factor to go with NativeScript.

Incentivized

• Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
• The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
• Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.

Incentivized

• Slightly better documentation when it comes to command line build troubleshooting.
• Increased widget library (even though it's much improved today).
• Native chart/graphing widgets.

Incentivized

• The need to know the native Android and iOS APIs to access device hardware and other platform-specific functionality
• Not all user interface components are available for free
• NativeScript has no HTML and DOM, which requires some deep knowledge of different UI tools to be implemented instead

Incentivized

• Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
• iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
• Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.

Incentivized

The hybrid is ok but native is better for performance and the right use case I want to go for is the performance without dealing with too many development tools.

Incentivized

Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

Incentivized

The community support is excellent.
They have a slack community as well as a discourse forum
forum.nativescript.org
Both of these offer community driven support.
The forum is more for a threaded discussion. The slack community is more for a quick talk.

Incentivized

I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

Android Studio

• Busy
• Confusing
• Marginal IDE
• Large footprint
• Single device development

IonicFramework

• Lean, no IDE needed
• Web browser preview
• Multi-device development
• Scripting of build packages for deployment

Incentivized

Ionic Ionic is an excellent Angular-based framework for mobile, and it does give a lot of access to the native device api's. However, the technology is based on Cordova, which means the apps being built are just webviews, with html, css and JS all running on the UI thread, and potentially creating very slow experiences for users. NativeScript is a truly native solution, and so provides a faster user experience. ReactNative We evaluate ReactNative, and found it much the same as NativeScript. The main difference is that your JS is all written with React, while NativeScript lets you choose between normal JS, Angular, and Vue. For our team, Angular was the most appropriate choice.

Incentivized

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

Incentivized

• The ability to create a mobile app quickly by a single developer (saving $20K).
• Increased customer satisfaction.
• Avoids outsourcing costs of $10k-$20k.

Incentivized

• The poor quality of NativeScript documentation has the potential to weigh heavily on development timelines, budgets, and QA resources in a NEGATIVE manner.
• The poor interoperability of NativeScript plugins can significantly increase development time.
• The need to seek out professional instruction to learn how to use NativeScript effectively may become a burden on your budget.
• The number of breaking changes between versions of NativeScript, may cause your development efforts to lag further behind the most recent releases of NativeScript and your other chosen environments than you are accustomed to.
• NativeScript still does not support the latest major version of Angular. Any significant changes to the other environment components of your systems may hold you back even further while NativeScript plays catch-up.

• Saves development time and deliver fast.
• Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
• Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed

Incentivized