Anyone here do much nativescript? I have never done any mobile dev but know angular quite well.

I'm trying to decide if it's worth jumping right into nativescript or taking my time to learn standard java and swift dev first to understand the underlying code... Then there's xamarin. Any advice?

I’ve built a few things in nativescript and I personally wouldn’t recommend it. In my experience it’s almost more difficult to produce something of production ready quality in nativescript than it is to build using the native languages. But it does depend on your use case I suppose.

@Sotch-pr35mac so xamarin? What about ionic? I heard xamarin can be a massive pain but ionic is hybrid with performance impact...

@craig939393 speaking solely from my personal experience, I’ve found that Ionic *feels* more native than nativescript (my experience with ionic is limited). If it was a choice between the two I would recommend ionic.

I haven’t used Xamarin so I’m not going to comment on it.

I think it really depends on your use case.

Stay away from hybrid and build Native the way god intended.

There’s a reason why so many of these bloody things drop off the radar or die a year later

@practiseSafeHex takes too long for most projects. Even if you know both native languages well (which is no small feat, especially if OP has an assignment already), the repetition will slow you greatly and Is pointless unless you are fiddling with some advanced device access.

I have fallen in love with react-native because of how flexible it is. The component system has a learning curve but once it clicks it's clear how powerful it it. It's well documented, supported and in active development. It's fast and tremendously easier to debug than other cross platform products. You also avoid having to use visual studio like you have to with xamarin.

To add to @jeeper. React-native is great for quick dev and great end result in both mobile platforms. It has a downside of fragile build system but I have apps in production for clients. If you know react then learning react-native is quick as you need only to understand building apps from source code.

@jeeper nope.

... was going to leave it there but thought I’d better add more to it. Every hybrid tool to date has had the same things said about it before it fails “but this time it’s different”. Hybrid tools are the new JS frameworks. Using these tools dilutes the community base to a tiny fraction of what it could be, greatly increasing the risk of coming across bugs / issues you can’t fix. Given the fact that it abstracts away the base API’s and makes you use another layer, chances of this happening are high.

Incase this happens it’s recommended to know iOS or Android or both, quite well so you can write native modules if needed. This completely negates the issues around time to learn, because either way you need to learn more than one way.

I’ve spent years using hybrid tools and the issues you face on native are tiny in comparison. You get to share a common codebase, but the ease of development and time savings being quoted are simply not true

@practiseSafeHex i tried to get into native, I really did, but writing the same classes and other bits of reusable code and formatting the same HTTP requests on slightly different syntax is a slog. Then every bug requires refactoring twice. I haven't found the build systems any more tedious than native. I still have to build an ipa and a jar and sign them either way.

If all you are doing is building a CRUD app with HTTP requests I think react-native is the way to go. Especially if you alone manage all mobile development.

Plus react-native has been around a little more than 3 years. Far from truly mature but certainly not passing in terms of hybrid frameworks and it has the support of Facebook. Loathe that Or love it, they have the engineering power to keep it current for a while.