J2ObjC vs NativeScript: What are the differences?
Developers describe J2ObjC as "Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime used by Google Inbox to share 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and Web". J2ObjC is an open-source command-line tool from Google that translates Java code to Objective-C for the iOS (iPhone/iPad) platform. This tool enables Java code to be part of an iOS application's build, as no editing of the generated files is necessary. The goal is to write an app's non-UI code (such as data access, or application logic) in Java, which is then shared by web apps (using GWT), Android apps, and iOS apps. On the other hand, NativeScript is detailed as "Build truly native apps with JavaScript". NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.
J2ObjC and NativeScript can be categorized as "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" tools.
"Backed by Google" is the top reason why over 3 developers like J2ObjC, while over 55 developers mention "Access to the entire native api" as the leading cause for choosing NativeScript.
J2ObjC and NativeScript are both open source tools. It seems that NativeScript with 17.2K GitHub stars and 1.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than J2ObjC with 5.47K GitHub stars and 771 GitHub forks.