A few years ago, the choice between native and hybrid apps seemed obvious. Native iOS/Android provided the best quality while Ionic, Cordova and PhoneGap offered a decent low-cost alternative. But now the hybrid approach has a new contender.
Cross-platform technologies like React Native (RN) promise higher quality with similar cost-effectiveness. Our development team has already tried it at work and built a few cross-platform apps for our clients.
I’m ready to release React Native pros and cons and conclude whether it makes sense to migrate your old Ionic/Cordova/PhoneGap app to RN (or use it in new projects).
- Terms explained
- What would users love?
- What would make the app development more efficient?
- What do big players choose?
- Conclusion
Ionic, PhoneGap, Cordova and React Native: Terms explained Ionic is an HTML5 framework that is responsible for making hybrid UI look and feel closer to that of native apps.
The framework includes a wide range of UI components (e.g. buttons, menus, cards, etc.), interactions (e.g. navigation gestures) and layouts that imitate the look of the targeted platform.
Apache Cordova is an open-source framework for building mobile apps with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
The result is essentially a single page web app that runs inside a WebView (a barebones full-screen browser without an address field).
Cordova has a number of plugins to access the hardware features.
PhoneGap is a distribution (sub-type) of Cordova maintained by Adobe.
Both frameworks are the same at their core, but PhoneGap has a few minor additions that integrate it with the Adobe ecosystem.
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