Get With The Program(ming) With NativeScript
In February a local entrepreneur fulfilled his dream of launching an e-commerce app to help college students. Upstate Interactive spent six months designing and building him a mobile application that he could get in front of users as quickly as possible and within his budget. It is currently in the app store (CampusPro.) and has been rolled out at UAlbany. It was a great experience to develop and launch a truly native iOS application to the app store while building in my preferred development stack — JavaScript, Angular, and Node.js — with the help my friend NativeScript.
Mobile application development has become a murky world. Improvements to the performance of web applications on mobile devices have blurred the line between responsive web applications and native mobile applications. How do you choose between native, hybrid, progressive, or web apps? There’s not always one right answer. It comes down to your business goals, timeline and budget. Upstate Interactive can help you decide which option is the right solution for your business.
Why use nativescript for mobile app development?
There are a few different web frameworks for native mobile development that allow developers to build cross-platform apps (web, iOS, Android) from one code-base with minimal platform-specific customization. At Upstate Interactive, we prefer to work with an open-source framework called NativeScript. NativeScript developers can access the native core APIs while building with front-end web languages like JavaScript and Angular. Because it accesses iOS and Android core, there is a seamless user experience without the use of web views. Developers can design the app for all devices, access device features like Bluetooth, camera and geolocation, and deploy to both the App Store and Google Play.
I love developing mobile apps with NativeScript. However, as with any development project, it does come with its set of challenges.
Here are a few things I was surprised about:
- While you can save time by building for iOS and Android at the same time, there are still platform-specific bugs that need to be accounted for from a time and resource perspective. In order to achieve great performance on each platform, give yourself some leeway in your timeline to customize and test on as many devices as possible as early as possible.
- NativeScript released Sidekick, which is supposed to make app installation and deployment simpler. Because it is still so new, I preferred deploying to iTunes Connect through Xcode. Xcode seems like black magic most of the time…but once you get your app running, you can test on a number of different devices and uploading it to iTunes is pretty straightforward.
Here are a few things I was excited about:
- NativeScript is a very powerful tool with strong backing, so improvements are constantly being made from a very active and accessible NativeScript community.
- They host conferences featuring presentations by the developers. I attended their conference in NYC in the fall, which was a great opportunity for my team and me to ask questions, provide feedback, and learn the latest updates. They are responsive with GitHub issues and always have people responding to questions in their Slack channel.
If you have any questions on choosing which type of app to build or any questions on development with NativeScript specifically, please leave a comment!
My next post will be a tutorial on the process to deploy to Apple’s App Store through xCode and iTunes Connect. Stay tuned :)
