Ionic vs React Native - Which is the Best Cross-Platform Framework?

With the rising demand of smartphone users, it has become important for businesses to focus on developing mobile apps. Not just mobile apps but a seamless medium for communication between the clients & customers.

But while developing a mobile app, an important question comes to the mind; Which is the Best Cross-Platform Framework?

Therefore, to clear out this confusion about the best mobile development framework, let’s do Ionic vs React Native comparison based on different parameters.

Building Blocks:

Ionic is an HTML5 framework that makes use of a wide range of UI components. For building a hybrid app using Ionic, the code is compiled using Cordova/PhoneGap, hence called its building blocks.

Whereas, React Native has a different approach. Rather than building a single app that runs on all other platforms, React Native allows you to share a large portion of JavaScript code among Android, iOS and Universal Windows Platform.

This approach makes the components in React Native reusable. Using this approach, app developers can directly compile the code in the native platform. Hence, the end product becomes more efficient, having a better look & feel of applications in comparison to Ionic.

Adaptability:

If we talk about platform adaptability, the battle between the two becomes even more intense.

As the same code is used to run the application across all platforms, ionic becomes a better choice for cross-platform development.

React Native does not allow you to ignore platform-specific logic, similar to native app development. Therefore, you have to focus on developing platform-specific components. This outlook gives an edge to React Native over Ionic in terms of adaptability.

Testing:

It is the point where both the technologies are neck to neck. Both of these cross-platform frameworks allow real-time testing with previews across different browsers. However, React Native is one step ahead as it even shows the preview of modifications while working on them.

App Rendering:

The basic difference between the two technologies lies in the app rendering.

Ionic makes use of web technologies to render an application. The main programming language of Ionic is TypeScript, which is its main advantage & allows the mobile app developers to write the code once and run it across different platforms.

On the other hand, React Native makes use of JavaScriptCore virtual machine (JVM) for both iOS and Android.

Developer Community:

Now comes the most important aspects of the two technologies – community support!

Both have fairly a well-built community. But if we focus on the difference between the two, ionic is more popular on Stack Overflow. While all the answers related to React Native is available on GitHub. The strength of the community for these platforms is equally comparable.

The most significant difference is that Google supports Ionic whereas Facebook supports React Native. As already stated, one technology is leveraged to create native apps while the other is focused primarily on hybrid apps. So, it depends on what your preference is.

Conclusion:

Depending upon on your business needs and expectations, a mobile app developer could guide you best to choose between the two technologies.

Saving time and money is one of the key factors that stand in favor of hybrid apps developed using Ionic. React Native App Development allows rapid development and strong performance.

We’d recommend you to test the two before finalizing one platform. And, when it comes to building state of the art mobile apps for business, you don’t need to look beyond Your Team in India. We have all the expertise, knowledge and resource you will need to build a mobile app your business deserves.

For any queries, just drop us an email at info@yourteaminindia.com and we will get back to you with all the details!