I completely understand why working with a "hybrid mobile" tool like Ionic is MUCH easier than working with a "native" tool like RN ... the question is just - do you absolutely require a "real" native app, or is a hybrid app (based on WebView) more than "good enough"?
In the latter case, by all means I'd go with Ionic (or comparable 'hybrid' tool) because it's just much quicker and easier to work with ... if you MUST have a real 'native' app, then well, it's either native iOS/Android, or RN, or Flutter - I've heard many great things about Flutter and maybe you're discounting it a bit too quickly.
But the decision between "do I really need native" and "is hybrid (more than) adequate for my needs", that just depends on your requirements ...
I'd guess that 70 or 80 percent of mobile apps are just fine as 'hybrid' or PWA apps - typically apps that are content focused and that aren't doing technically crazy complex things ... in all likelihood performance in those case is great if you use hybrid/PWA, and you don't gain much by building them as a 'native' app.
There's another option, too, that we see growing in popularity: build a native app shell using whatever tech your team wants to use, and then mix in web experiences in a micro-frontend fashion. Our Portals project does this and it's pretty interesting seeing die-hard native app teams embracing this approach to move faster and enable other teams to contribute to an app: ionic.io/portals
I completely understand why working with a "hybrid mobile" tool like Ionic is MUCH easier than working with a "native" tool like RN ... the question is just - do you absolutely require a "real" native app, or is a hybrid app (based on WebView) more than "good enough"?
In the latter case, by all means I'd go with Ionic (or comparable 'hybrid' tool) because it's just much quicker and easier to work with ... if you MUST have a real 'native' app, then well, it's either native iOS/Android, or RN, or Flutter - I've heard many great things about Flutter and maybe you're discounting it a bit too quickly.
But the decision between "do I really need native" and "is hybrid (more than) adequate for my needs", that just depends on your requirements ...
I'd guess that 70 or 80 percent of mobile apps are just fine as 'hybrid' or PWA apps - typically apps that are content focused and that aren't doing technically crazy complex things ... in all likelihood performance in those case is great if you use hybrid/PWA, and you don't gain much by building them as a 'native' app.
There's another option, too, that we see growing in popularity: build a native app shell using whatever tech your team wants to use, and then mix in web experiences in a micro-frontend fashion. Our Portals project does this and it's pretty interesting seeing die-hard native app teams embracing this approach to move faster and enable other teams to contribute to an app: ionic.io/portals
Interesting !