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I'm an Android developer and I've never touched iOS app development. I want to start developing hybrid apps since It can be a pain and time consuming to develop native apps for both platforms differently. I'm trying to choose either Ionic 2 or React Native. A few questions that I have,

  1. Which framework needs less native development experience? Since I don't know iOS development, I want to make sure I use the framework that won't require me to code in Objective-C/Swift.

  2. Is Ionic 2 similar to React Native in terms of performance/smooth UX? Will a regular user notice the difference?

  3. Which framework offers more native-like features? For instance, background services in Android.

Jaspreet Singh
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Ionic 2 requires almost zero native knowlege/experience. We're developing with Ionic for both ios and android and it's no pain at all - the code is all the same and ionic-native provides a lot of native features out of the box.

I have very few experience with React Native but the one I have states that you should probably have some native experience if you want to create something more than lists app. Moreover you've got to support 2 platforms for sure and they differ to much to call it easy.

There are some issues with Ionic possible like:

  • cordova plugins sometimes might be of a poor quality
  • both angular and ionic 2 released recently so there might be some bugs but that's not that critical as there are always workarounds and they are constantly being fixed.

So, if you want really the same code (with very minor differences) for both platforms, lots of angular features and ui components Ionic is the right choice.

If you want better performance (this is the perspective of optimized coding though) and lightweight framework to setup all the dependencies on your own try React Native.

Yaroslav Grishajev
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  • What do you mean by lists app? – Jaspreet Singh Mar 15 '17 at 18:54
  • just some app that shows data in lists. I'm exaggerating here and what I mean is that the more complex you app gets the more native knowlege your need – Yaroslav Grishajev Mar 15 '17 at 18:56
  • is performance good and smooth with Ionic 2? Any noticeable differences? – Jaspreet Singh Mar 15 '17 at 18:58
  • I can say that it got much better after they released and now I'm quite satisfied with performance. Nevertheless you'd probably need to think about not overloading DOM and use things like lazy loading. I would suggest to create simple app with Ionic and React Native and create same list of data with images in both apps and see it on your own. This shouldn't be too hard as both provide cli commands for creating sample projects. – Yaroslav Grishajev Mar 15 '17 at 19:03
  • One last question, are both Ionic 2 and React native free to build and release apps? – Jaspreet Singh Mar 15 '17 at 19:10
  • You mean if you need to buy them? No, they are opensource and are free of charge. – Yaroslav Grishajev Mar 15 '17 at 19:20