Ionic vs React Native: Which One Works Best For Mobile App Development?

What was once called an exaggerated statement – there is an app for that – has now become a crystal-clear reality. Since the number of smartphone users have burgeoned to whopping 3 billion with more adding every day, companies are seeing a big fortune in investing in mobile app development. The fact that they discover copious target customers from online platforms has inspired the decision of making mobile apps for some or all of their business interactions.

However, availability and easy accessibility of mobile development technologies often bewilder enterprises. The choice especially is tough when it comes to picking between React Native and Ionic development – which are effortlessly renowned solutions these days. React Native usually helps build native apps while Ionic helps with hybrid apps.

Let’s take a brief look at the comparison between them two getting to a verdict as to which one suits best for you.

React Native: Highly famous and quite old JavaScript framework, React Native can be used to craft features-rich native apps for businesses of any scale. It has lush community who is positive about the framework and always active contributing more innovative solutions now and then.

Ionic: Ionic has recently become more popular because of its cross-platform app development capabilities. This powerful framework is used to build hybrid apps and consists of technologies like CSS, SAAS and HTML5. It also relies on Cordova software to produce excellent UI experience for your business apps.

The structural foundation

When it comes to exploring the structure of both frameworks, things are a little different. React Native allows users to simply learn it once and apply everywhere. However, Ionic works on a slightly different mechanism – it lets developers reuse the written code by writing once and applying it anywhere. This differentiating factor makes Ionic appear brighter among other JS frameworks.

Also, when focusing on the simplicity factor, RN is built with Angular JS which is simple to learn. The knowledge-specific framework makes it easy for AngularJS expert to write codebase to build cross-platform apps. Ionic is cohesive of multiple technologies including CSS, HTML5 and SAAS that make it feasible to develop highly interactive, user-friendly apps.

Element of Performance

Having scalable business apps with innately uninterrupted performance is nowadays a typical requirement of modern business digital transformation models. React Native here wins the battle on the face of performance. The apps created with RN are visibly more responsive and efficient compared to apps made with Ionic.

The chief reason why Ionic doesn’t seem to deliver app performance like React Native is that it runs on different UI systems for both iOS and Android. This slacks off the instant response mechanism expected in large-scale business apps. Therefore, Ionic apps are perfect fit for small and medium scale businesses.

Convenience of reusable code

React Native runs short in case of using pre-developed codebase unlike Ionic environment where developers get to explore a generous stack of pre-developed codebase. Ionic thus enables reusable code that developers can use anywhere. This means, Ionic comforts users who seek convenience through the process of hybrid app development, diminishing app development cycle to a fair extent.

Access to hardware environment

For an app to be able to access the phone system, React Native is an apt solution. It is built to work with a specific platform. React Native does not rely on additional software to create accessibility to your smartphone since it has in-built potential to connect and interact with the phone’s local features. However, in Ionic technology, users have its Cordova system to interact with phone’s local environment.

Resources and Community

React Native is relatively an old framework that has by now developed a thick community of contributors and technical experts most of whom are associated to Facebook and Instagram. Because of this, the RN library contains thousands of third-party plugins and solutions for bug fixing, tweaks, improvements, integration and more. The nifty community people can help resolve your queries fast. On the other hand, the Ionic framework is also quite remarkable in its niche and is not entirely completely new. Hence, when it comes to online resources and community support, Ionic never disappoints users and ensures great support.

Cost and Development cycle

Since Ionic follows ‘write once use anywhere’ principle for code reusability, it is a little more advantageous over RN in terms of development time. In comparison, RN takes much time which translates into increased development cost. Ionic apps in the end are cost-effective and consume less amount of time for the development process. This makes it clear that Ionic app development best suits low-budget, medium-scale apps that need to be made quickly.

Conclusion

From above comparison and honest analysis of pros and cons of React Native and Ionic frameworks, one can comment that both are quite strong and powerful technologies. They both support your dream of building user-friendly, feature-rich mobile apps for today’s evolving digital market. When it comes to landing a choice on the best one, we should consider many diverse aspects of your business type and project requirements.

Factors like cost, project challenges, expected time frame and development cycle, volume of target users majorly influence the ultimate decision as to which one to choose from React Native and Ionic. However, for ambitious projects – and if you are open enough – you can opt for React Native since RN-based apps usually register great performance and impressive user experience.