Climb to NativeScript, enjoy the Vue...
July 24, 2018
Climb to NativeScript, enjoy the Vue...
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with NativeScript
We are testing NativeScript to see if it will be a good fit for the next version of our app. We have an e-learning education platform focused on mobile. Our current version is built on ionic v1, and we are looking for a better alternative. Our app needs to be offline first, but the courses and content are downloaded from the internet. The app has lots of gamification features. It needs to be much slicker than it is now in the current stack.
- 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.
- Web build. It is still hard to share code with a web build. In our case, we want to build a web app with pretty much the same functionality. Other frameworks are stronger at this point.
- No hot-reload. It still takes a couple of seconds to test an app. React Native does it better... With NS-Vue, the live-reload is even more fragile...
- Tooling. Overall, NS could use better tooling. Again, RN does it better.
- Better NS-Vue support. It is improving very well, considering it is a community effort. I see NS organization 100% supporting NS-Vue, but it is still not at the same level as NS-Ng, for instance.
- (I haven't built an app in production yet.)
I have several hybrid alternatives like Cordova + jQuery Mobile and ionic (which uses Cordova and angular). These alternatives always let you down in the long run because the performance and "feel" is never comparable to a true native app. Especially when the app's complexity scales to a considerable size. It is also hard to get to native functionality like storage or a persistent database.
I also tested Weex, a Vue.js-native framework, but is it just not very reliable, with poor tools and very poor community. NativeScript's community is awesome!