NativeScript vs. Unity vs. Unreal Engine

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

Unity is excellent for 2D and 3D games and educational experiences. It is well-suited for VR and AR development. It is also a great platform for mobile games. It is less-suited for non-game purposes (although it can certainly be used for those as well), or educational experiences. It is also less-suited for AR experiences that are highly complex, where you will probably want to write the native code in Android Studio or Xcode, as the case may be. It is theoretically less-suited for cases where performance is a huge concern as well, although, in my experience, performance has never been a problem.

Incentivized

It's really well suited for experiential uses. Sure, games are made with it, but I'm guessing that more non-gaming assets are being made with it than anyone realizes. It's a fantastic post-production for 3d modeling tasks. It's fantastic for fast nearly photo real rendering. It's almost as good at rendering truly photo real assets now that Path Tracing is becoming mature. It's fantastic for creating background and matte plates for video and film production. There are few things that do that as well as it can. It's not well suited to modeling the initial 3d object so you really need to have something to build the 3d assets in. Hard asset modeling and creating is the one area that it's lacking. But, even if it never rises to the level to compete with 3ds Max or Maya, etc., that's ok, because it's just another tool and it does what it does so well, that modeling deficiencies can be overlooked

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

• Unity is a multiplatform game engine. It has more than 20 options for exporting your game, ranging from desktop, mobile, console, web and, lately, VR and AR. Unity was one of the first game engines able to export games playable on internet browsers and it helped to cement the World Wide Web as a place fit for gaming.
• Unity has a very smooth learning curve for beginners. It is easy to start and soon you are seeing some tangible results of your efforts. The game engine has all sorts of helpers and shortcuts to facilitate some frequent tasks in game development.
• Another of Unity's advantage is the access to Assets Store from within the game engine, allowing the user to import instantly objects, scripts and textures from the store into their projects. Such easy access to these elements from inside a project greatly enhances speed production and is particularly helpful to beginners.

Incentivized

• Achieving proper depth effect of the background layer
• Walkthrough videos of any given layout can be easily prepared and made more immersive
• Creating the most detailed 3D models
• Takes very little time to produce the required renders depending on the complexity of the input

• 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 Linux version of the Unity editor can be improved.
• There are some aspects in the development process that Unity is not as good as Unreal Engine.
• Some of the core functions of the tool, like the Mecanin State Machines could have some improvements to match the competition.

Incentivized

• The modeling tools are getting better but have a good way to go to really be intuitive
• They are trying to bridge the gap between coders and artists and have done well but more needs to continue to happen to enable users who have little experience writing code to be able to use it effectively. It's not that this is a "room for improvement" thing per se, it's just that more of it needs to be done and I think they know that and are on it.
• It's so powerful, it's difficult to find anything else that needs improvement. It's kind of mindblowing what it's capable of.

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

It is good for beginners compared to other software. There is a lot of documentation and a huge community of developers, so it is easy to find the support and information you might need, especially if you are just starting out with the software. Plus, it is free to start.

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

The support of unity is what distinguish its from other platforms. You can download any assets and that asset library will guide you and if its still not work for you then you can ask in their community where there are tons of professional developer waiting to answer your query. So yah Unity support staff is what impress me the most and I would give it the 10/10.

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

We love utilizing unreal engines but we seem to have a better use case for the architectural visualization side of things. This has given us the ability to find better more photo-realistic assets from not only the marketplace but 3rd party sites that have a unity bases file to work off of.

Incentivized

Despite the fact that the Unreal Engine user interface took some getting used to, it was rather simple to navigate once we got the hang of it. Furthermore, Unreal Engine offers unrivalled flexibility and fine-tuning tools. Twinmotion has a slightly complicated UI as well, but the number of options for personalization and fine adjustment is limited

• 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.

• Unity has allowed us to serve customers which we would otherwise not be able to serve, which has brought in new markets and along with it helped us achieve our business goals of providing top-notch AR and VR experiences.
• Unity has also allowed us to rapidly produce educational materials which we use for teaching VR and AR to students, so that's been a big win.
• There have been no negative impacts from Unity besides the initial upfront cost of learning the software, although the learning curve was very accessible. Our investment of time in learning this tool and putting it into practice has paid off in our ability to provide rich, immersive AR and VR experiences for our clients.

Incentivized

• It's helped a tiny studio like mine to compete with larger and more financially sound studios.
• It gives me another product from which I can derive a revenue stream.
• Unless you are publishing a game for sale or a packaged product, UE is free to use and tinker with. You can use it to build something amazing to use in your portfolio which in turn can help you sell your skills.

Incentivized