Ignite UI vs. NativeScript

Angular is our framework of choice for a number of reasons. Business data is almost always displayed in a grid format. It makes sense to start with a strong widget that is powerful and fast when building applications. Ignite UI provides a complete toolset of widgets for other frameworks, but Angular is our focus. Ignite UI is helping us deliver a great UX/UI.

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

• The examples are great and close enough to real-life usage to be truly helpful
• The OOB configuration and themes are good. They are very configurable.
• The touch support and response web are built in, allowing the same code to work well on desktop and phone.

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

• I would like to see examples with security tokens. It really isn't an Ignite UI issue, but would be helpful.
• Some of the examples are over-simplified, not how the products would be used in real life.

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

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

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

We tried DevExpress when we started a project a couple of years ago. At the time, the documentation and ease of use went to Infragistics. When trying new or updated tools, the documentation and samples are everything. Having minimal documentation or documentation that seems to be written for people that already know how to use the product is just plain frustrating. Samples need to be something close to the real-life usage of the product.

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

• There is a learning curve, of course, but the comparisons between the projects with and without Ignite UI are worth it.
• The time savings on development is very real. The built-in functionality is amazing.
• We are able to focus on features rather than getting the look and feel of our deliverable.

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.