When it comes to building mobile apps for iOS or Android, you, of course, can learn Java and Android for Android and Objective C and Swift for iOS. Now, of course, knowing all these languages is a bit cumbersome.
Imagine you are a web developer who knows to React and wants to use what you already know there to build Native mobile apps.
Well, guess what, you can do that and not just since today actually for quite some time? You might have heard of this React Native thing, which allows you to build native mobile apps for iOS and Android with React.
Now we got a brand new option available, and that is React Native vs Ionic. No matter if you know Ionic or not, it is with you. I will explain what Ionic is against, but most importantly, I will explain the difference between React Native and Ionic with React and why you might go for one or the other approach.
So hopefully, this helps you build the mobile apps you want to develop. Or gives you an idea of how an app development company builds an app using it.
What’s the difference between React Native vs Ionic React, or when should you use which
Let’s start with React-Native; it is a project maintained and actively developed by Facebook. React Native code looks very similar to our normal React for a web application, but it’s not the same. Instead, here you will not use normal HTML elements.
These are imported from React Native or from custom components because React-Native doesn’t have access to this web primitive. Instead, the idea behind React Native is that you have these components that React Native knows how to compile to Native iOS or Android UI elements.
React Native applications are all about compiling your user interface code to real Native UI elements. Our JavaScript code, for example, your JavaScript logic for sending HTTP requests or for handling authentication, will stay. JavaScript, so that’s not compiled. Still, your UI is compiled to a Native UI, so you get a real Native app as if you would write it directly with Swift or Objective-C or with Java.
But with the one important exception that all your logic JavaScript code at the end just hosted in a virtual machine of that app, it’s not compiled. But that’s the thing with React Native.
Ionic has a different goal. Ionic, if we have a look at it, it is two things.
- It’s a company called Ionic
- This company also has a product called IONIC, a library open source, free to use library. Now, this library, in the end, is just a web component library. So in the anti-Ionic framework, it is simply a package you could say, which you can import into any application, which gives you a bunch of web components. It has nothing to do with Native mobile apps or Ionic or anything like that.
You can build web components, your custom HTML elements with just JavaScript that’s all you need. In the end, this what the Ionic team did, they built a suit a collection of custom components with beautiful styling and of course, even with some logic attached to them, which you can import and then use like regular HTML elements in any web project you’re building, that’s Ionic.
The Ionic company has a different background, though in the past, when they built Ionic 1, currently they are on Ionic 4. Still, when they built Ionic 1 that was angular only for AngularJs.
It was not about web components, it was about angular components in the end. It was also about building Native mobile apps so that you could use angular and your web development knowledge to build Native mobile apps.
Nowadays, Ionic is a bit more flexible. As I just explained Ionic, itself just this collection of web components. Still, the Ionic team also has another product and free to use library that is open source. The name of the library is called Capacitor.
The Capacitor is a library that allows you to take any web app doesn’t even have to use an Ionic any web app and turn it into a Native mobile app.
How does this work
It’s not magic, and it’s also not compiling code; instead, it gives you a mobile app shell and then hosts your web app in a web view inside of the app.
So what you deploy is a real app which you share to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. But it’s basically that shell with the web app inside of it.
The Capacitor is not just for iOS and Android. It’s the entire electron that allows you to build desktop applications. You can also enhance your web app with Capacitor because it gives you a lot of APIs that you can use to implement things like geolocation or the device camera, and so on.
Things like the camera then even work in a web app where it also tries to access the device camera if one is available. So Capacitor is a project that can take any web app to the next level and also allows you to turn a web app into a mobile app.
A capacitor works together well with an Ionic because all these Ionic components can be used without a Capacitor. It’s not a must use, but all these Ionic components are configured and styled to look incredibly tremendous and stunning on Native mobile apps.
They also look great on a desktop device, but they also have everything built-in to look great on mobile apps. They even have automatic detection of which underlying platform they’re running on; for example, a toggle on iOS should look like a toggle should look like on Android automatically.
So that’s Ionic, you build web apps with it, and together with the Capacitor, you can turn this web app into a native mobile app.
React Native
With React Native, you build a Native app because your code gets compiled to Native code, or at least your UI code gets compiled. There also is a project React Native web, which allows you to use your React Native code to get a web app out of it, but the difference to an Ionic is that you need this extra project to do the translation.
With Ionic, you can use normal HTML elements in your code to build a regular web app with Ionic with React Native. Of course, the advantage of React Native is you get a compiled user interface, which typically will offer a little bit better performance than the hosted web app, as you can imagine.
This might matter in some apps, besides React-Native of course generally has its approach to its API switch it exposes, and it’s also really nice to work with.
What’s the special thing about Ionic React
React Native already allows us to build Native mobile apps. It gives us everything we need for that it’s developed by the company which also develops React, why would we use Ionic with React
Well maybe because of the ease of use. Ionic since you build a web app, it is really easy to build a cross-platform application for mobile and the web with the tools you already know.
In the end, you will build a regular web app, a regular React web app.
The special tags in this are simply the web components exposed by the Ionic framework. Other than that, you work with normal HTML elements, and you work with regular CSS styling, work with all the browser API’s you know, and so on.
So you work with React as you’re used to it, which makes building cross-platform apps super simple; you don’t have to worry about the complex stuff, unlike React Native, which of course, has its own merits.
Unlike React Native, you don’t have to learn a new way of styling or a new way of structuring your layout or navigation; instead, you basically work with the things you already know.
Of course, the downside is the potential performance disadvantage and maybe you also want to use this new approach React-Native gives you. Perhaps you’re all looking for a certain API switch that only exists in React Native and not really in Ionic or Capacitor.
Then, of course, React Native is great and there are many great reasons for a React Native In general.
But Ionic React a great alterNative. It makes building cross-platform apps easy, and I can only recommend that you give it a try and that you have a look at Ionic it’s an amazing project.
It’s really simple and fun to build cross-platform apps with these technologies, and it’s simply great to have another alter Native besides React Native app development company. You can try them out both, have a look at them, and then go with your favorite
It’s amazing to have these options, and now there’s really nothing in your way to build a real Native or, even better. An actual cross-platform application with Evo React Native vs Ionic React
