Who will Win the Cross-Platform War – Ionic or React Native?

React Native and Ionic are seen to be the most popular frameworks among developers across the world in the contemporary mobile app development market. Each having its own key features and restrictions, choosing the right technology for accomplishing project-specific objectives is no easy job. For that matter, developers are faced with the difficulty of whether to choose between Android and iOS or between React Native and Ionic. While Ionic was developed by Drifty, React Native has been developed by Facebook. When it comes to Ionic Vs React Native, there’s so much to be considered in Mobile App Development.

The number of Smartphone users is Growing in Exponential Manner

The Debate Between Hybrid and Native Apps
In order to comprehend and distinguish between React Native and Ionic, it is essential to understand about hybrid and native apps. Hybrid apps are in fact websites that are embedded in a mobile app by what is known as web view. Being developed by using CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, they are capable of executing same code regardless of the particular platform they run in. Making use of tools such as Cordova and PhoneGap, they can use a device’s native features such as camera or GPS.

Native apps, on the other hand, are being developed in the specific language that the platform they target requires, such as Java for Android, Swift OR Objective-C for iOS. Here, the code is not being shared across the different platforms, and their behavior differs. These have direct access to all the features provided by the specific platform with no restrictions. The question of ionic vs react native calls for an individual analysis of each framework.

Attractive and Fully Functional Apps are the Deciding Factors

React Native and Ionic – The Basics
React Native has been created with the objective of making native app building easier. This framework includes view layer consisting of React components that are nothing but small fractions of code which describe the appearance of your app on the basis of input data, which in turn depends on the native platform that the app has been built on. Performance of native apps is found to be better, especially in animation and rendering, than the hybrid apps. This was one of the primary reasons why React Native was created in the first place. Its task was resolving poor hybrid performance issue while improving the otherwise inefficient process of creating native apps.

Ionic, on the other hand, proves to be a mobile development framework that was designed for making the app development process easier. It is a typical hybrid development framework that uses web technologies for writing and rendering the apps, for which it requires Cordova or PhoneGap bridges for accessing the native features. It then tries to reproduce native behaviors for offering the best user experience.

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