The interest in hybrid mobile development continued to grow within my professional circle throughout my years working as a Lead Developer. Some people saw it as an affordable way for their organization to enter the mobile space, others saw it as a way to consolidate existing codebases. Whatever the reason be, my involvement started when this question came about: “Should we pick Ionic or React Native?”
It’s an important question – time and money are going to be invested in this decision. Arguably as important, this decision sets the direction for development teams. What’s unfortunate is that material written for that question is, in my opinion, of poor quality. After researching this topic thoroughly, I find that most articles will pit React Native and Ionic against each other in cagematch fashion: two frameworks enter, one framework leaves.
Sticking with fighting metaphors, these articles provide a tale-of-the-tape; comparing differences like GitHub stars and framerate. I’ve yet to read an article comparing frameworks on client requirements, project complexity, and organizational needs; factors that carry far more weight than hitting 60 frames-per-second.
The honest truth is that both Ionic and React Native enable developers to build beautiful, performant mobile apps, which made it a very difficult choice to have to make as a Lead Developer. I can’t give you a “one-size-fits-all” answer here — if that’s what you were looking for with this article you can bail and I’ll understand. I can provide insight into lessons learned and experience gained leading projects in both projects that I wish I had known the first time I had to make that decision.
Misconceptions
Honestly speaking, I haven’t read a comparison article that doesn’t position React Native as the better framework; it leverages actual native components so performance is better, and it creates standard native projects so you can more easily mix-and-match JavaScript and native code together.
During my first year or so developing hybrid mobile apps, I strictly used Ionic and Cordova. I was excited to dig into React Native when the time came, but quickly realized that the comparison pieces were a bit misleading.
#engineering #perspectives #ionic #react #react native #programming
