Mobile applications have brought about a great change in our daily life with an increasing number of smartphone users globally. It has allowed developers to build great apps as mobile technology advanced through the last decade.
Designing mobile apps does not require you to be fluent in any difficult programming language. There are a variety of frameworks available if your idea is to build an app for iOS and Android. Simply knowing web-based programming languages like HTML, CSS, or JavaScript is enough.
Modern frameworks have several advantages like efficiency, speed, and a bug-free environment. The framework runs code with pre-built components including compilers, debugging tools, and a toolkit.
When businesses hire developers, they use these application frameworks that can reduce the common problems that arise while developing applications. Application frameworks help to simplify development of web-based applications and create graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
These app development frameworks are mainly used for native apps, web apps, and hybrid apps. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, Ionic, and Apache Cordova are some well-known frameworks. We have measured why you must understand two of the best frameworks for creating hybrid mobile applications, Ionic vs React Native.
Here are the topics that we have covered to explain about Ionic vs. React Native:
Ionic developers can create Android, iOS, and web apps. Besides, Ionic offers native APIs and cross-platform UI components that can be used for developing amazing cross-platform mobile apps.
React Native helps developers to create a cross-platform application by offering platform-agnostic native UI components. And these native components can easily get mapped into the native UI building blocks in the best native app mobile framework.
Winner – React Native
For developers familiar with web development, Ionic offers a familiar, cutting-edge web development experience. It uses modern JavaScript and TypeScript, advanced web APIs such as web components, and deep integration with Progressive Web App APIs. It’s modern web platform for native mobile app development.
Ionic is write-once code that works. Not only does it dramatically cut down on the time it takes to target your audience, but it’s also likely much faster than building one traditional native app!
With JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and over one hundred extensible and well-designed components, Ionic just makes it faster to get to a functional app than almost any other approach.
Even when competing with other cross-platform technologies, Ionic has been known to pull off the unimaginable and release an app ahead of schedule for teams striving to meet unrealistic deadlines.
Ionic is a superpower that helps entrepreneurs to reach the widest audience on day one for teams striving to establish their risky new product or company and get traction (across iOS, Android, and web). No other platform achieves this better than Ionic, which is optimized to be very practical.
Although React is a front-end platform, it is not rigid and may be combined with a variety of other back-end technologies. In this sense, Reacts functions more like a thriving ecosystem of tools and strategies.
Luckily, the fact that React was created and is heavily used by Facebook to address their issues only adds to the library’s quality and efficiency in dealing with similar problems faced on other projects.
React is designed for building robust component-centric applications. However, although it’s a front-end technology, React is not opinionated and can be paired with a variety of other technologies executing the back-end, too. This way, Reacts serves rather as a vibrant ecosystem of tools and approaches. It can be used for web app development (where it all started,) mobile app development, static site building, desktop apps development, and even VR app development.
There are four core sections in React Native architecture:
The ionic framework essentially renders a native WebView full-screen web browser component after taking HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to construct mobile applications. With technology like Capacitor or Cordova, the Ionic codebase includes WebView during runtime. The Ionic app is, to put it simply, a mobile-based website that is displayed on a mobile application.
Since Ionic always takes a hybrid approach to mobile app development, it cannot create Native apps. Ionic performs worse than React since it requires plugins to access native capabilities.
Compared to Ionic vs. React Native, React Native offers better performance. Ionic is sluggish and loads Native features more slowly. The same construction blocks that Native apps employ are also used by React. It improves the performance and responsiveness of React.
Ionic |
React native |
Diesel Diesel has its Ionic app. Because of the Ionic framework, the app comes with good performance and high-quality UI that makes it look and feel like a native app. |
Facebook released React Native in 2015. They made Facebook Ads with the React Native framework and achieved excellent results. |
McDonald’s Turkey McDonald’s put efforts into building a solid digital presence. That’s why they decided to go with Ionic for their food ordering app in Turkey. |
React Native helped Instagram developers improve their velocity and deliver the product much faster and share 85% to 99% of code between the apps and Android and iOS. |
Cryptochange The ionic framework was used in Cryptochange, a cryptocurrency tracker app. It tracks over 100 different cryptocurrencies. You may utilize this app to buy cryptocurrency. |
Airbnb Airbnb an online rental marketplace needed to speedup the development time to quickly penetrate the market. React Native helped them in creating a native-like experience. |
InstantPot The InstantPot Ionic app makes it simple to find recipes, bookmark favorites, take notes, and even create grocery lists. This application made with the Ionic framework is rated so well for its design for iOS and Android. |
Bloomberg Bloomberg offers global business and finance news. React Native accelerates the release of new product features and provides users with a streamlined, interactive experience on all platforms. |
Sworkit Sworkit through this Ionic app development, the creators made sure that the application was as universal as possible. Therefore, it contains an enormous diversity of training exercises and videos. |
UberEats UberEats is a popular food ordering app needed to enhance its built-in restaurant dashboard. They used React Native to enhance RN framework. |
Ionic supports faster development and also provides 1.5x faster performance than its previous Ionic 3. Importantly, Ionic developers get most of the inbuilt features and functionality that speeds up development. There are some of the most significant changes that Ionic 4 has received that help in boosting development speed.
The cost-effectiveness of React Native accommodates more room to add new possibilities in terms of features, scalability, the outcome. One such cost-effective method is using Cross-platform mobile app development. The objective of this technique is to develop software or apps for several platforms. This is accomplished by writing one round of code to support several platforms. This method reduces the overall cost as well as the time required to create apps.
With Ionic and React Native there’s enough room for creating a hybrid mobile ecosystem. The capacitor is a great example, providing Ionic developers with tooling on par with React Native and solving a lot of the pain points of Cordova.
A lot of times, the decision on when to use React Native or Ionic comes down to what is the focus of your project. If you want to build an experience that heavily relies on augmenting the design of native features, you should go with React Native.
If you want to build a complex design to run on different across platforms? Go for Ionic. Its prefabricated design lends itself to a faster time-to-market, but both frameworks excel for this use case.
So ultimately, give both Ionic and React Native a shot. Don't base your decisions on the notion that one framework is superior to another. By assessing your own business needs you'll quickly be able to decide which framework is best for your project. You can reach us to get help from our expert developers.
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