[My experience] The marriage of Angular and NativeScript

Building apps can cost you Time and Money if you don't know which technologies you need to use, which is maintainable and which is scalable.

We all agreed that hybrid apps do not cost much, but when it comes to performance you need to be careful.

PhoneGap open's the door for JavaScript and HTML/CSS to enter the mobile world, then Apache Cordova (which is a fork from PhoneGap) Then it's comes the famous Ionic which is Angular Framework build for Cordova platform.

But the performance was not quite good, and sometimes not acceptable at all.

So as Always I start for Alternatives, there's Xamarain with C# (I'm Sorry I'm not a C# developer). I moved on and I found ReactNative And NativeScript, I choose the second because I'm an Angular developer.

Initially, NativeScript lets developer create Native mobile views and using Javascript as Code behind, then They introduced building apps with Angular, which helps the Angular developer to give a try the mobile development.

Personally, I didn't try NativeScript with Angular.js, the first app I've Made is with Angular2+.

As I mention the layout rendering is Good and fluid, but I've got some complication when using Nativescript:

Garbage Collector (Android Only)

We all know that Angular output is quite big than a plain Javascript app. when exploring the app that I've made, I experience a random UI freeze, and it's remarkable and it affected the user experience.

After an Investigation, I found that the JavaScript GC(Garbage Collector) triggered when no more RAM is available and that causes the freeze ( from 0.5s to 2ssecondsd on Angular). After many issues opened on Github Panayot Cankov wrote a blog (Deep Dive into NativeScript 3.1 Performance Improvements ) about performance and explained why and when this issue happens.

Then in the announcement of NativeScript 3.2 (Announcing the Release of NativeScript 3.2) they introduce an experimental flag "markingMode": "none" for Android, I Tired and the freezes are gone.

Launch Time

Using Angular with NativeScript will affect the launch time especially on Android, and it will take longer than Vanilla Javascript .

Using Webpack to minify and uglify speed up the App, but when I tried the Snapshot flag(Just for Android) I felt the difference.

So what's Snapshot?

It's a previously prepared JavaScript context. Instead of fetching, parsing, and executing scripts on every startup, the NativeScript Android runtime looks for a previously prepared binary file that is the result of those tasks, to reduce the amount of time it takes for your app to get up and running.

Angular 2+ is very structured and it has clean Architecture patterns and it helps you build a scalable application without struggling.

Conclusion

I found that NativeScript and Angular is a successful marriage and I hope it continues.

Other opinions? leave a comment.