Two of the more popular options for building mobile apps today are hybrid apps built with Cordova, and frameworks for building apps with native user interfaces such as NativeScript. In today’s Slack chat we’ve invited in a few of our Telerik Developer Experts that have experience in both worlds to help you decide which framework you should use for your next app. The questions for today’s chat are:
What do you think are the best use cases served by each technology—Cordova and NativeScript?
Along the same lines, what are the pain points you’d associate with each?
What specific features or criterion do you consider a deal breaker for building with Cordova?
Let’s start by having everyone provide a brief intro, including the expertise you have with each of these technologies.
Nick Branstein: Telerik Developer Expert and Senior Consultant with KiZAN Technologies. I’m currently writing NativeScript in Action with Mike Branstein.
Josh Sommer: I’m a Web Application Developer for Renovo Solutions LLC and Telerik Developer Expert. I’ve done contracting work and built apps wrote with Cordova/PhoneGap in the past as well.
Nic Raboy: I have been developing Apache Cordova applications with Ionic Framework since 2013. I have a course titled Ionic Framework 101. Recently I’ve been focusing on NativeScript and its Angular 2 support. I also have released a NativeScript 101 course. In all scenarios I have tutorials on my blog.
Brad Martin: Telerik Developer Expert, Director of Development at Nastek National. I’ve worked with Cordova for 2 years, published an app for NASTC that has over 4k downloads between Android and iOS. I’ve also been working with NativeScript for a little over a year now. My main focus the past year has been learning the framework and creating community plugins – there are over 7k+ installs across the various plugins I’ve worked on. I also blog here.
Osei Fortune: I’m also a Telerik Developer Expert and a full stack developer working at TOSL Engineering. I’ve been using Ionic since it was in beta and built a couple of internal apps using it. I recently started working with NativeScript for about a year now and have created a couple of NativeScript plugins that have about 5k+ downloads – a socket.io plugin being my first.
Nathanael Anderson: I am also a Telerik Developer Expert and have been developing software for 20+ years and currently own Master Technology. I work actively in the NativeScript community and was the author of Getting Started With NativeScript
Jen Looper: I’m a Developer Advocate at Progress, working closely with our TDEs, many of whom are joining us today. I’m doing a lot of work with NativeScript these days. I have a gigantic and unmanageable app portfolio described on my blog. I have a mix of Corona SDK apps, hybrid and NativeScript apps.
TJ VanToll: And I’m also from the Developer Relations team. I’ve been building with both Cordova and NativeScript for a few years, and I have apps in the iOS App Store and Google Play built with each.
Ok, let’s dive right in. What do you think are the best use cases served by each technology—Cordova and NativeScript?
Nic Raboy: I’ve seen a lot of good things with NativeScript that are graphics and animation heavy. Being able to use the native platform features is great for performance.
Apache Cordova applications are great for web developers looking to quickly spin up a mobile application because you can use standard HTML and JavaScript without having to worry about learning new XML markup.
Nick Branstein: I think both frameworks are great for developing business to consumer apps. As Nic mentioned NativeScript excels in performance because it isn’t rendered in a webview.
Josh Sommer: Personally I think Cordova is great for rapidly prototyping an app.
Brad Martin: Cordova serves a great audience for developers and businesses. Simple data consumption – CRUD apps are the best use case that I think of Cordova apps. Anything that needs graphics, 60 fps animation and native API access to get better performance you have to get away from the webview in my opinion.
Nick Branstein: My personal opinion is that NativeScript takes Cordova and kind of does it better because it’s also a great way to rapidly prototype apps across platforms with the added bonus of using native libraries and controls.
TJ VanToll: We have a large group of people here that have used both of these frameworks successfully. Anyone want to talk about a thing they built?
Nic Raboy: I don’t have any applications in production anymore as I focus more on developer tools and plugins. I have a very popular Oauth plugin that I built for Apache Cordova and a very popular Couchbase plugin that I built for NativeScript.
Nathanael Anderson: The thing I like about Cordova is it is using web technologies; it is fairly simple to get up and running and rapidly prototype. However, since working with NativeScript and using my LiveEdit plugin, I only prototype with NativeScript now.
Josh Sommer: I built a streaming “talk” application a couple years ago for a client. It used PhoneGap for Android and iOS then BlackBerry WebWorks (I think that was their implementation of Cordova, can’t remember then name for sure. ) for a BlackBerry 7 app.
Osei Fortune: Well I liked Cordova since it allows quick prototyping but when I’ve needed something with a little more complexity, Cordova has kinda failed me, so it always had me thinking about going back to native dev. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72x72/1f615.png" alt="