When comparing Ionic 2 vs NativeScript, the Slant community recommends NativeScript for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” NativeScript is ranked 5th while Ionic 2 is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose NativeScript is:
Used by Svelte framework for native development.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Android, iOS and Windows Phone compatible
Pro Deploy as PWA
Pro Native functionality via Cordova plugins
Pro Built on Angular 2
Pro Svelte Native
Used by Svelte framework for native development.
Pro Leverages knowledge in Angular
Angular is a very popular framework, and teams already developing angular will feel right at home with Nativescript + Angular
Pro Works great with vue.js
Cons
Con Old version
No point keeping this here, is the old version of ionic.
Con Uses WebView which impacts the app performance
Con Nativescript + Angular apps for Android tend to have long startup times.
It's very difficult to have acceptable startup times with NS+Angular in Android. It's not uncommon to see apps taking 6 sec or more to start AFTER having been optimized with Webpack (mandatory!). The same app in iOS takes only 2-3 sec. Also, this seems to happen only with the NS+Angular flavour. People using plain NS (without Angular) don't seem to have the issue.