NativeScript makes cross-platform mobile app development easy, fast, and efficient.
April 10, 2018
NativeScript makes cross-platform mobile app development easy, fast, and efficient.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with NativeScript
We are a consulting company and use NativeScript for apps internally and externally for customers. We chose to use NativeScript as a mobile app development platform because of its native performance, native UI generation, and ease of cross-platform mobile development. Furthermore, we can leverage existing skills on our development teams (Angular, TypeScript, and CSS) to create native mobile apps. This was the first platform we tried that was easy to get started with, and provided the least amount of friction for developing mobile apps.
- NativeScript allows you to build on skills many development teams already have: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Many developers understand the paradigm of web development where you have HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to define an application's behavior. NativeScript apps are similar. By using a similar paradigm of development, it enables web developers to quickly jump into their first app, write it quickly, and see the results on iOS and Android.
- The NativeScript Playground sets NativeScript apart from other technologies. The NativeScript Playground is a browser-based environment for developing simple NativeScript apps. It’s a great place to get started learning NativeScript, as you can develop apps without needing to install the various SDKs and tools needed for native iOS and Android development. All you need is your browser, and an Android or iOS mobile device connected to the internet to get started. We use the NativeScript Playground to quickly prototype apps. It's an extremely powerful tool.
- NativeScript provides abstracted UI and component APIs to access native iOS and Android hardware and UI components. This accelerates development because you can write a singular UI and business logic code for both iOS and Android, thus saving time. At the same time, you have the ability to access native SDK/APIs of the underlying platforms through JavaScript.
- NativeScript has three flavors of development: NativeScript Core, Angular, and VueJS. NativeScript Core uses XML, JavaScript, and CSS to build native apps. But, if your developers already know Angular or VueJS, then you can build NativeScript apps using Angular/VueJS development paradigms.
- There are dozens of online resources for getting started, troubleshooting, and staying up-to-date with NativeScript: forums, slack channel, twitter, online docs, NativeScript snacks, NativeScripting, blogs, etc. The community has been very strong, and continues to be a shining star NativeScript.
- If users jump directly into NativeScript Angular and are not familiar with NativeScript or Angular yet, it can be difficult to understand where NativeScript ends and Angular begins. This can be confusing.
- The ROI on using NativeScript for app development for us has been approximately a 75% decrease in the price of mobile app development for our customers. When creating native apps on both Android and iOS platforms, we used to need a significantly greater amount of time. Now, we can bring cross-platform mobile apps to our customers at a reduced cost.
We have previously evaluated Xamarin, and the time it took us to get started, install all of the software, license it, learn Xamarin, and create a app that runs and debugs on connected mobile devices was painful. With NativeScript and the Playground, we're able to get started fast - in less than 5 minutes, and be running a mobile app on multiple connected devices. Furthermore, we could make changes and see live changes on the mobile apps.