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I've been in that situation 3 times, I choose React Native and Flutter each once. I was forced to use Ionic. I would NEVER use Ionic again, terrible experience and very difficult to get decent quality/performance. I like Flutter's technology much more. I like that it is natively compiled. I dislike that it has it's own UI toolkit. React Native with TypeScript is a highly productive environment but I LOATHED the developer experience and any code that had performance goals was way harder to be successful with, not impossible but the threading model that RN imposes (it doesn't really thread at all) was hard to make the UI snappy and crisp as it should be. I've played with Xamarin also since I was a .net dev for 10+ years (I'm old in the industry 25 years now) and the developer experience was actually pretty good but the compile times and the UI performance were not. Though that was not a production level app and I might have been able to make it work.

tldr; If I HAD to do cross platform I'd use the following logic to choice one: If I have a team of react JS/TS devs: React Native else if I have a .net team: Xaramin else: Flutter

Then I'd apply for a job writing native apps in Swift/Kotlin and run away ;)




Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Ionic. The stack has improved considerably in recent years and actually Capacitor, our replacement for Cordova, was just rated the highest satisfaction mobile tool on the latest State of JS survey. Cordova was definitely a sore spot for Us but we’ve since moved beyond that and you can use any web stack to build apps with Capacitor (seeing a lot of React + Next.js apps of late)


Out of curiosity, what version of Ionic were you using?

Ionic 4+ is a complete rewrite from the ground up to use web components.

I use it in a non-traditional way, I do vanilla js + lit-html + web components and it works great.

Performance is smooth, mobile first approach makes responsive apps straightforward.

I don't do any of the native things or command line app creation or any of that.

I've been generally pleased with it.


> a job writing native apps

Sadly, a shrinking market day by day.




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