7 Problems With Hybrid Mobile Development And How NativeScript Solves Them

I’ve been a mobile application developer since 2010 and I’ve played around with my fair share technologies and frameworks. While I’ve developed applications that can be safely classified as vanilla native or core native using Java, I’ve spent most of my time developing cross platform applications for Android and iOS using frameworks such as Ionic Framework and NativeScript that support web technologies.

The convenience of cross platform development with web technologies doesn’t come without penalty for certain frameworks. After all, mobile development frameworks can be split into a hybrid web category which act as web applications bundled into a mobile application and a native mobile category which act as web applications compiled into a mobile application. The difference being in my use of bundled vs compiled.

We’re going to see some of the problems that developers face when choosing to use a hybrid development framework such as, but not limited to, Ionic Framework vs a native development framework such as NativeScript.

Give That Slow Hybrid Mobile App A Native Performance Boost With NativeScript

When it comes to hybrid mobile application development, there is always discussion around the performance of said applications. While hybrid mobile applications have come a long way in terms of performance since the early days, they still can’t quite live up to the performance expectations that are delivered in a native application.

We’re going to take a look at why hybrid applications suffer in the speed department and how other similar frameworks such as NativeScript can take your applications to the next level without severe changes to design or development.

Build A Ripple XRP Wallet For Android And iOS With Ionic Framework

A few days ago I released, what turned out to be, a very popular article around developing a Ripple XRP wallet. It was titled, Create a Cross-Platform Desktop Ripple XRP Wallet with Vue.js and Electron, and it focused on cross-platform desktop application development. A popular request on Twitter was around developing a mobile Android and iOS wallet for Ripple XRP coins.

We’re going to see how to use Ionic Framework and Angular to create a Ripple XRP wallet for Android and iOS. Because our desktop application focused on the JavaScript stack, our mobile application will be able to recycle a lot of our code.

Apache Cordova And Ionic Framework Apps Are Not Native Mobile Apps

If you’ve been keeping up with my content since the birth of The Polyglot Developer, you’ll know that I was once a huge advocate of Apache Cordova development using frameworks like Ionic Framework. Having been a web developer and coming from native Android development with Java, cross-platform development using hybrid technologies seemed like a logical next step. Fast-forward to now, I’m no longer using Apache Cordova with Ionic Framework and have gone back to native development.

I recently came across an article by Ionic’s CEO, Max Lynch, titled, Cordova/Ionic Apps are Native Apps, trying to explain that Ionic applications are native mobile applications. There are some valid points made in this article, but as someone who spent several years using the technology as well as using applications built with the technology, it is not something I agree with as a whole.

JavaScript Libraries In A TypeScript Application, Revisited

If you haven’t already gotten involved with it, you’ll probably know that TypeScript is becoming increasingly popular. Being able to use a superset of JavaScript in a typed language that compiles down to JavaScript is a great thing. However, if you’ve ever played around with TypeScript and tried to use JavaScript libraries, you’ll probably know that sometimes it can be a real pain. Often JavaScript libraries do not ship with type definitions which are critical when it comes to playing nice with TypeScript.

If you’ve been keeping up with The Polyglot Developer you’ll probably remember two posts that were created. Previously I had written about including external JavaScript libraries in an Angular application as well as adding type definitions to external JavaScript libraries in TypeScript.

We’re going to revisit these two articles and explore all the ways to include JavaScript libraries in TypeScript applications. These include applications built with NativeScript, Ionic, and Angular.

Upgrading Your Hybrid Apps To Native With NativeScript

As someone who has developed both hybrid web applications and native applications, I understand the differences and advantages each brings to the table. While I agree that you can do some pretty neat things with a hybrid web application built with frameworks like Ionic, I no longer think it is as great of a solution as it once was.

With hybrid web frameworks like Ionic 2 and native mobile frameworks like NativeScript both using Angular, you have to step back and ask yourself what you’re truly getting as an advantage as of now in hybrid. Performance is one of many reasons why native still makes more sense, and being able to use Angular, why wouldn’t you?

This is why I spent a lot of time creating an upgrade guide to demonstrate how to take your hybrid mobile application built with Ionic 2 and Angular to native with NativeScript and Angular.

Build A Time-Based One-Time Password Manager With Ionic 2

A few years back I created an Android and iOS application called OTP Safe that managed time-based one-time passwords. This application was made with the first version of Ionic Framework and at the time was great because it accomplished more than the Google Authenticator application. Now that Ionic 2 is approaching stable release, it seemed like a cool idea to take this one-time password application and build it with the latest and greatest including Angular.

We’re going to see how to create an iOS and Android time-based one-time password manager using Ionic 2, Angular, and TypeScript.