Ionic React vs React Native

Ionic react vs react native, both great technologies to build mobile applications with multiple native functionalities, however, what is the difference between them? And what you should use for your cross-platform mobile application? In this blog “ionic react vs react native” we will discover each of them and compare them so you can choose wisely.

Let’s start firstly introducing each of them.

What is ionic?

Ionic is freely available, open-source, and a front-end SDK framework that enables you to create mobile-based applications for iOS, Windows, and Android phones using the same codebase. It proves out to be a cross-platform tool for mobile development. This tool allows you to create hybrid mobile applications.

Ionic react

Ionic React is an open-source UI and Native API project consisting of cross-platform UI components and native functionality for building iOS, Android, Electron and Progressive Web Apps using React and standard web technology.

Pros:

• Has a good documentation, since it’s a company specialized in building tools that help companies and developers to make mobile applications.
• These tools are well understood by web developers since it uses WebView to render the application (letting the developers use day-to-day technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).
• Makes it easy to port the code into a Progressive Web App (PWA), since all the code is built to run in a web browser. Ionic just requires a few extra steps to be able to have one PWA.

Although it has benefits, we can also encounter some challenges in the way, like the ones listed below:

Cons:

• Since the organization behind the framework makes a living from it, besides the fermium features, there are also premium ones that you can only use if you pay an extra cost.
• Ionic is built on top of the “web browser”. The application code can’t easily access the native functionalities.

React native

React Native is an open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook, Inc. It is used to develop applications for Android, Android TV, iOS, macOS, tvOS, Web, Windows and UWP by enabling developers to use React’s framework along with native platform capabilities

Pros of react native

Faster to Build

The major selling point of React Native is the shorter development time. The framework provides numerous ready-to-apply components that can accelerate the process.

We built the very same app with both React Native and Swift. The latter took as much as 33% more time to build and still was working only on iOS – with no Android version.

One Framework, Multiple Platforms

React Native allows you to reuse the codebase (or just a part of it) between iOS and Android. In practice, full cross-platform development is possible to some extent, depending on how many native modules you use in your application.

Developing with JavaScript also provides an opportunity to share the codebase not only between mobile platforms but also React web applications. Active development of tools like React Native Web seems to point in this direction. This also allows the same developers to work both on web and mobile applications, as the technologies are very similar.

Fast Refresh

The React Native team seems to be listening to the community’s voice carefully. One of the top React Native pain points was that the Hot Reload feature was broken. Most developers had it turned off as it was unreliable. The response to these complaints is Fast Refresh. This tool, released at the end of 2019, fixes all the issues that Hot Reloading has and provides a great developer experience that speeds up both building new features and bug fixing.

Smaller Teams

Native development requires two separate teams for Android and iOS. It can hamper the communication between developers and, accordingly, slow down the development. Native Android and iOS teams have their own projects, and they often have different development speeds and methods. As a consequence, two projects can easily become inconsistent. It can lead to differences in the app’s implemented features, behaviour and appearance.

Fast Applications

Many argue that React Native code might hinder an app’s performance. JavaScript won’t be as fast as native code, but you won’t see the difference in most cases, anyway.

Simplified UI

React Native is solidly based on creating a mobile UI. In native development, you will need to create a sequence of actions in the application. RN employs declarative programming in which such an order of implementing actions is obsolete. As a result, it is much easier to spot bugs on the paths a user can take.

 Large developer community

React Native is an open-source JavaScript platform that allows developers to contribute their knowledge to the framework’s development, which is freely accessible to all. If a developer experiences a problem, they can turn to the community for support (as of mid-2020, there are nearly 50,000 active contributors to the React Native tag on Stack Overflow). There will always be someone who’ll be able to help them resolve their issues – this also has a positive impact on improving coding skills.

Cons of react native

Compatibility & debugging issues

While it may come as a surprise – after all, React Native is used by top tech players – it’s still in beta. Your developers might come across various issues with package compatibility or debugging tools. If your developers aren’t proficient in React Native, this might negatively impact your development as they spend time on troubleshooting.

Lack of Some Custom Modules

Despite its maturity, React Native still lacks some components. Others, in turn, are underdeveloped. The chances are you won’t have a problem with that, as the majority of custom modules you need are available, well-documented, and working properly.

However, it might happen that you will have to build your solution from scratch or try to hack an existing one. When developing your custom modules, you could end up with three codebases (RN, Android, and iOS) for a component instead of only one. In each of those codebases, there can be differences in behaviour and appearance. Fortunately, those situations don’t come about often.

Native Developers Still Needed

Implementing some native features and modules necessitates having detailed knowledge of a particular platform. The lack of out-of-the-box support for many native app functionalities (e.g. push notifications) used to be a significant issue with React Native development.

As the community grows, more and more open-source libraries provide easy access to native platform features. Nevertheless, the implementation of some more advanced features might still require help from iOS and Android developers.

Their input depends on the complexity of your project, but you need to bargain for them when kicking off with React Native. This might be an issue for small teams, in which developers don’t have any native mobile experience.

Ionic vs React Native: Which one is more popular?

Both have a wide community around them, with a strong adoption by big companies and mobile applications used by a very large number of customers. This is what we can perceive from npm trends data:

As seen in the graphic above, Ionic had way more downloads than React Native in 2017. This occurred because Ionic is older than React Native. At that time, it was more mature, ready to be used in mobile development, with less bugs and more stable. After 2019, Facebook put more effort into making React Native a stable library, by updating it frequently, using it in their own products, and presenting showcases about the results. Ionic vs React Native: Which one is more popular?

Both have a wide community around them, with a strong adoption by big companies and mobile applications used by a very large number of customers. This is what we can perceive from npmtrends data:

Ionic react and react native are both great technologies to build mobile applications with multiple native functionalities, however, what is the difference between them? And what you should use for your cross-platform mobile application? In this blog we will discover each of them and compare them so you can choose wisely.

Let’s start firstly introducing each of them.

Ionic vs React Native: Which one is more popular?

Both have a wide community around them, with a strong adoption by big companies and mobile applications used by a very large number of customers. This is what we can perceive from npm trends data:

As seen in the graphic above, Ionic had way more downloads than React Native in 2017. This occurred because Ionic is older than React Native. At that time, it was more mature, ready to be used in mobile development, with less bugs and more stable. After 2019, Facebook put more effort into making React Native a stable library, by updating it frequently, using it in their own products, and presenting showcases about the results.

Both have a wide community around them, with a strong adoption by big companies and mobile applications used by a very large number of customers.

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