09/17/2018 14:19A few years ago, the choice between native and hybrid apps seemed obvious. Native iOS/Android provided the best quality while Ionic, Cordova and PhoneGap offered a decent low-cost alternative. But now the hybrid approach has a new contender.
Cross-platform technologies like React Native (RN) promise higher quality with similar cost-effectiveness. Our development team has already tried it at work and built a few cross-platform apps for our clients.
I’m ready to release React Native pros and cons and conclude whether it makes sense to migrate your old Ionic/Cordova/PhoneGap app to RN (or use it in new projects).
1. Terms explained
2. What would users love?
3. What would make the app development more efficient?
4. What do big players choose?
5. Conclusion
Ionic is an HTML5 framework that is responsible for making hybrid UI look and feel closer to that of native apps.
The framework includes a wide range of UI components (e.g. buttons, menus, cards, etc.), interactions (e.g. navigation gestures) and layouts that imitate the look of the targeted platform.
Apache Cordova is an open-source framework for building mobile apps with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
The result is essentially a single page web app that runs inside a WebView (a barebones full-screen browser without an address field).
Cordova has a number of plugins to access the hardware features.
PhoneGap is a distribution (sub-type) of Cordova maintained by Adobe.
Both frameworks are the same at their core, but PhoneGap has a few minor additions that integrate it with the Adobe ecosystem.
