In the era of making technology smarter and the enhanced use of mobile phones, people expect everything to be digitized and be done using their fingertips, be it monetary transactions, staying apprised with the latest affairs, shopping, booking a ticket, ordering food and what not?
Mobile applications, therefore, have become the most interactive way for users.
Are you looking to get a mobile application developed to shape your business? Then this technical blog is a must-read for you.
Mobile App Development does not simply mean Android or iOS app development. There is more to it.
Let’s take a simple example. You are trying to publish a newsletter to be sent to your audience in Spain and the US. Although a huge portion of your audience understands English while the remaining one is comfortable with Spanish.
So, you’ll have to draft the newsletter in two different languages sentence by sentence. It is time-consuming plus puts up the extra costs. But you have no choice.
Switching to mobile app development, the same is the scenario with Native App Development but the developer community is blessed with a Cross-platform application development wherein a single code base can be used for both the users- Android as well as iOS.
Ionic and React Native are the two most used frameworks in this category. Before we emphasize the differences between the two, let’s get an outline of them individually.
An Introduction to Ionic
Having been released in December 2013, Ionic is an open-source UI software development kit for developing cross-platform mobile apps.
The ionic framework offers a library of components and plugins including UI components, front-end building blocks, common app icons, etc. These plugins let developers connect to native APIs like Bluetooth, GPS, or a built-in camera without having to build custom integrations. It is a joy for ionic developers to work on ionic apps.
An Introduction to React Native
This reputed open-source framework allows you to build mobile apps with only Javascript. React Native was developed by a Facebook software engineer for simpler development and better UX. It permits 90% of code reusability between android and iOS applications. It boasts large support for the developers.
Let the war begin!
Ionic and React Native both hold separate positions in the mobile app development world. Belonging to a similar family, declaring the winner of the war might be tough since they have a lot in common but let’s try to figure it out by a detailed walkthrough.
Tech Stack
React Native is written in Javascript and its UI is written in Javascript and XML markup rather than HTML. “It is nearly native” and the underlying widgets are native iOS or Android components. The look and feel of React Native are very similar to a native app.
On the contrary, Angular is simpler than the opponent as it wraps HTML, CSS, and Javascript code and rends it onto web view to build mobile apps.
Ionic opens up to be more flexible as it uses Angular and Vue.js to build ionic apps. This tech stack of Ionic is not very sound as compared to React Native.
Performance
Since Ionic approaches hybrid mobile app development, it does not provide nativeness. React Native is different as it uses a lot of plugins to make the application “native”.
Therefore, Ionic is slow and takes more time to load whereas React Native is faster, thus providing better performance and responsiveness.
Cost to Development
Ionic is cheaper if we talk about the development terms. Since the same code can be multiplicated and reused, thus we can get a hybrid application developed in a cost-effective manner.
React Native is an open-source platform that is available to everyone for use and has the free-plugins as well. But while comparing the two, the overall project cost for React Native is more than Ionic.
Third-Party Libraries
Ionic uses Javascript for the logic and javascript provides support to Angular. Since Javascript and Angular ecosystem is huge, so there are many third-party libraries available in Ionic.
React Native uses Javascript and React and hence the developer community can find a lot of threads and third-party packages on Stackoverflow that can add to the missing functionalities. But its ecosystem is not very strong it keeps changing, so it’s not feasible to keep pace with it.
Testing Cycle
Ionic is a hybrid app so its testing can be done easily on a web browser. For React Native, the test modules are required to be set up only on mobile phones which does not make it much easy to test.
Popularity
Here is a data study by npm trends that reveals that in 2017, the number of downloads of Ionic was more than React Native. But soon after, React Native saw a substantial rise in downloads and saw great popularity since then.
Learning Curve
As we have described in the Tech Stack, Ionic is flexible and has HTML, CSS, and Angular as its main components, thus the developers do not learn a lot of new.
On the other side, React Native involves the in deep study of React and Javascript in addition to the knowledge of mobile app development, producing a steep learning curve with more growth.
Benefits of Choosing React Native Development
- It is written in Javascript and uses React as a robust web framework.
- React Native builds a cross-platform native app on both iOS and Android.
- With every new update, React Native features are upgraded and it becomes more interesting.
- React Native has a good developer community and it has raised the bar for react native development.
Benefits of Choosing Ionic App Development
- Ionic is written in JavaScript that supports most modern frameworks like Angular and Vue
- It is flexible and easy for developers to create apps as it uses easier technologies.
- Ionic builds cross-platform hybrid apps on both iOS and Android.
Summing Up
From the above study, React Native bags the title for “Winner” but even “Ionic” can’t be totally ignored. Also, Ionic, as well as React Native, have their own pros and cons which should be kept in mind by the developers and chosen effectively as per their requirements and technological behaviors.
Build a bold view of your future with Infowind Technologies- a React Native Mobile App Development company.
