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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. NativeScript vs Visual Studio App Center

NativeScript vs Visual Studio App Center

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

NativeScript
NativeScript
Stacks533
Followers1.1K
Votes516
GitHub Stars25.3K
Forks1.7K
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center
Stacks113
Followers232
Votes4

NativeScript vs Visual Studio App Center: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>

1. **Development Approach**: NativeScript allows developers to write code in web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and XML which is then directly converted to native Android and iOS code, providing a truly native experience. On the other hand, Visual Studio App Center is more focused on continuous integration and delivery, providing tools for building, testing, distributing, and monitoring mobile apps across multiple platforms. 
2. **Platform Support**: NativeScript supports the development of both iOS and Android apps with a single codebase, allowing for code sharing and faster development. Visual Studio App Center, however, caters to a wider range of platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, offering a more comprehensive solution for cross-platform development needs.
3. **User Interface Design**: NativeScript provides a seamless way to create native-looking user interfaces using its XML-based layout system, allowing for better customization and optimization for each platform. Visual Studio App Center, on the other hand, focuses more on backend services and analytics, leaving the user interface design aspect to other tools or frameworks.
4. **Integration Capabilities**: NativeScript integrates smoothly with various Native APIs, plugins, and libraries, allowing for deep customization and access to device-specific features. In contrast, Visual Studio App Center excels in integrating with Azure DevOps, GitHub, and other popular tools, making it easier to incorporate app development with existing workflows and pipelines.
5. **Live Reload Functionality**: NativeScript offers LiveSync functionality, enabling real-time changes to be seen on the emulator or physical device without the need to recompile the entire application. Visual Studio App Center lacks this live reload feature, requiring developers to rebuild and redeploy the app to see changes, which can slow down the development process.
6. **Focus on Testing and Analytics**: Visual Studio App Center places a heavy emphasis on app testing, crash reporting, and analytics, providing a comprehensive suite of tools for monitoring app performance, user engagement, and quality assurance. While NativeScript supports testing and analytics through third-party integrations, it does not offer an all-in-one solution like Visual Studio App Center.

In Summary, NativeScript is more focused on providing a platform for developing truly native cross-platform mobile apps with a strong emphasis on user interface design, while Visual Studio App Center caters to a broader range of cross-platform development needs, especially with its focus on continuous integration, testing, and analytics tools.

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Detailed Comparison

NativeScript
NativeScript
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center

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.

Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

100% Access to Native Platform API;NativeScript is free of charge as an open source project;Code with JavaScript. Style with CSS;Cross-platform UI abstractions;Shared business logic and data models
Build; Test; Distribute; Crashes; Diagnostics; Analytics; Push; CD/CI;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
25.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
1.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
533
Stacks
113
Followers
1.1K
Followers
232
Votes
516
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 75
    Access to the entire native api
  • 47
    Support for native ios and android libraries
  • 46
    Angular 2.0 support
  • 46
    Support for javascript libraries
  • 44
    Native ux and performance
Cons
  • 5
    Lack of promotion
  • 1
    Slower Performance compared to competitors
Pros
  • 1
    Slack integration
  • 1
    Show error issues for mobile devices
  • 1
    For Mobile apps diagnostics and tracking
  • 1
    Bug tracking integration
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Slack
Slack

What are some alternatives to NativeScript, Visual Studio App Center?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

Flutter

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

Xamarin

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

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