PWA vs. React Native

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Kirupa wrote this short article in which he describes decision process when one needs to decide between 2 technologies. Two of the hottest technologies for building cross-platform apps these days are Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and React Native.

In a magical world, if cost and time aren’t a problem, you should build both a PWA and a React Native solution and architect your app in a way to re-use as much logic between the PWA, React Native-Android, and React Native-iOS projects as possible.

The PWA gets you the widest reach where any device with a browser can view your app. The React Native app gets you richness/depth where you get to take advantage of a device’s native UI controls for maximum performance and familiarity for users.

Questions and answers the article helps you with:

  • Are you going mobile first or everywhere first?
  • If you want the lowest-cost option for your development team, then PWA wins
  • If you want the best UI responsiveness and performance, go React Native
  • If you care about low-end devices, PWA is slightly better than React Native
  • React Native creates a native app package (usually tens of megabytes in size!)
  • What are you (or your development team) skilled in?
  • Is your app consumer focused or enterprise focused?
  • Do you need access to native device APIs?

Deciding whether to build an app as a PWA or using React Native isn’t a simple game of creating a scoreboard and seeing who ends up with the highest score at the end. Good read!

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Tags app-development android