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NativeScript: Good for mobile performance.
February 16, 2018

NativeScript: Good for mobile performance.

victor pease solano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NativeScript

NativeScript is the main tool to develop mobile apps for internal and external projects. The main feature is the capacity to develop one source code to address ios and android using the actual experience the dev team has with javascript and angular. Because of their active community, we can reuse our experience and others' in order to speed up every project. Using the extensive library of components already available and the one we have built with the time, we reuse a lot of code saving time.
  • The fastest transition from prototype to final product
  • Javascript with angular allow us to use the actual experience. No need for native development
  • Native performance, you can exploit the hardware better than hybrid tools
  • If you come from the nodejs world, you will have to sacrifice some ways to deal with data. For example, we had to sacrifice PouchDB for offline data
  • The final size for Android could be huge compared with hybrid tools or the sameNativeScriptt for iOS
  • Some native development is required in order to exploit all the components
  • Sometimes web development experience is not enough. Even with Angular you need to learn some new concepts. Once dominated, you can rock native mobile apps
  • Positive: shorter delivery time because you don't have to go for the usual native workflow and you have a common base code for all mobile platforms
  • Positive: you can start faster to dominate your hardware. From the very beginning, you will be sure about the performance you will get
  • Negative: you can't have your prototype on a browser, you will require an emulator or a real device
  • Negative: training was required at the beginning because web experience is not enough. Not that you need to become an expert but some native knowledge is required. Also, you need to work on a standard way to deal with database and backend communication
Ionic and Apache Cordova are hybrid tools, both based on Webview which is ok for mobile offline data apps but for high-performance enterprise apps that is the limit. NativeScript can go where the number of rules and processing required force us to gain access to the native interface. While development with all these tools is fast, going for a hybrid is faster but sacrifices performance. With a little more effort you can have the same with NativeScript gaining that performance that you looking for
When you need to exploit all the hardware capabilities and the communication with the backend is critical, you better go with NativeScript. If your main feature is offline access then you better sacrifice some performance going with something hybrid like Ionic. The criteria to choose better is if the final application could work more like a web page, or you already have a web app and you want almost the same features in your mobile app, you will go for a hybrid, but if you want to go from scratch thinking on a completely mobile experience with performance where the connectivity is not an issue you will go for NativeScript.

Using NativeScript

10 - We have apps for the operations area dealing with storage control and app to capture customer orders on the field. For the storage control app, we need to control the barcode scanner integrated on the device in order to identify products on the fly. The app to take orders is basically included in all of the business logic from the online application in order to use them offline. This must be fast because you are not at the office.
3 - basically, we need one person with some native development background and two angular experts to support our operation. The rest of the team is basically database and webservices.
The person with native experience is in charge of testing and building the final binary also is the one with the ideas how to deal with the components of nativescript that give us access to the native features.
The other two angular guys came from web development but they accomodate pretty well to the new way to work keeping all their experiencie with javascript.
  • Control an integrated barcode scanner, or any other integrated component, on a mobile device for fast identification and control
  • Processing complicated business rules keeping a fast user experience in the mobile app
  • Faster UI, you have to go for NativeScript
  • we moved from pouchdb in hybrid mobile apps to couchbase with nativescript for offline database
  • We need to do some more work with geolocation
  • Battery efficiency is also another field for us to research
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.