Felgo vs. NativeScript

Felgo shines in rapid prototype development and fast iterations. It also has a very short learning curve compared to many other technologies that promise "code once, deploy everywhere." It is not appropriate if you are not willing to mess with the licensing related to Qt but I am still waiting for a clear answer on my doubts from the Felgo team.

Incentivized

I gotta be honest, after a PoC period, we choose to rewrite the whole application in a different cross-platform app. Our developers had to invest a lot of time and effort to debug a lot of plugin-related issues, which we needed to utilize the android mobile phone capabilities. QR reader, special visualizations, and fine-tuning were really hard and often resulted in writing native Android code instead of using the shared Angular code. In the end, we think that writing a standalone Android app and an Angular app would have been a better alternative, as the shared code base was so unreliable that it did not save us any time.

Incentivized

• Ready available solutions for all platform mobile app development.
• Live hot reloading of UI and other advance controls by Felgo implemented in Qt.
• Using Qt underneath provides an opportunity to developers to use it in all kind of sectors like embedded devices, mobile apps, desktop apps, games etc.

Incentivized

• True native app. The app uses native components and that is quite noticeable in the overall performance of the app. NativeScript is also awesome in the way we can access the native APIs, so we are never really constrained by the framework. If we need, we can just dive into the native APIs without leaving our environment and language (JS).
• Cross-platform. Builds for Android and iOS. It deals with the platforms differences very well.
• Support for Vue.js. Even though it is just a community effort, the NativeScript-Vue plugin is the best alternative to build native Apps with Vue.js. That was a major factor to go with NativeScript.

Incentivized

• QML component / C++ code with hot reload feature.

• The need to know the native Android and iOS APIs to access device hardware and other platform-specific functionality
• Not all user interface components are available for free
• NativeScript has no HTML and DOM, which requires some deep knowledge of different UI tools to be implemented instead

Incentivized

I am happy with the constant feedback that I am receiving from the team. Although most of it is marketing related, there are some interesting and valuable materials that they have been pushing to ease my learning.

The quality of the documentation and the ease of use may be some important values to take into account.

We believe that the agility that we have acquired until now for developing apps for our business cases give this framework an important lead.

Incentivized

The hybrid is ok but native is better for performance and the right use case I want to go for is the performance without dealing with too many development tools.

Incentivized

As with any product, Felgo has some edges to it, but from our past experiences evaluating "code once, deploy everywhere" platforms, we were really surprised at how fast the team went from exploring, into playing and presenting prototypes in very little time.

The dev cycle is really fast as I can get an almost instantaneous feedback on the changes that I make. And it is refreshing to see how I am able to target several platforms at once.

The javascript plus QML combination made it really easy to pick up for me and I am certain sure that many devs can migrate from Web only into multi-platform in a fast manner.

And there is also the possibility to implement C++ code if the need arises to support and bridge native libraries.

Incentivized

The community support is excellent.
They have a slack community as well as a discourse forum
forum.nativescript.org
Both of these offer community driven support.
The forum is more for a threaded discussion. The slack community is more for a quick talk.

Incentivized

The helpful, responsive customer support. In contrast to frameworks like Flutter, you can count on a professional team that can help you out if needed

Ionic Ionic is an excellent Angular-based framework for mobile, and it does give a lot of access to the native device api's. However, the technology is based on Cordova, which means the apps being built are just webviews, with html, css and JS all running on the UI thread, and potentially creating very slow experiences for users. NativeScript is a truly native solution, and so provides a faster user experience. ReactNative We evaluate ReactNative, and found it much the same as NativeScript. The main difference is that your JS is all written with React, while NativeScript lets you choose between normal JS, Angular, and Vue. For our team, Angular was the most appropriate choice.

Incentivized

• product not released so not applicable.

Incentivized

• The poor quality of NativeScript documentation has the potential to weigh heavily on development timelines, budgets, and QA resources in a NEGATIVE manner.
• The poor interoperability of NativeScript plugins can significantly increase development time.
• The need to seek out professional instruction to learn how to use NativeScript effectively may become a burden on your budget.
• The number of breaking changes between versions of NativeScript, may cause your development efforts to lag further behind the most recent releases of NativeScript and your other chosen environments than you are accustomed to.
• NativeScript still does not support the latest major version of Angular. Any significant changes to the other environment components of your systems may hold you back even further while NativeScript plays catch-up.