Cross-platform development: How to mitigate the issue of depending on 3rd party plugins for native functionality?

I'm starting a new project and it will be a cross-platform mobile app.
I'm considering using either ReactNative, NativeScript or Ionic 4 w/ Capacitor.

One thing I have noticed about all of these technologies is that custom behaviour or access to native functionality requires plugins.

While there are a variety of open-source plugins out there, this can be a risk. For example, let's say that your application relies on an iBeacon plugin.

1. What if there is no iBeacon plugin
2. What if there is a plugin but it doesn't do what you need it to do
3. What if there is a plugin but the developer abandons the plugin or is not working to fix issues etc.

Is your only option to learn how to build plugins?

We are a small company and don't have a lot of time for plugins as we are busy with the main product.

React-Native has been there for quite a while and has a strong community support. Now your case it entirely depends on design.

1. If you are designing the product then it would be better to take a
   look at react-native plugins while designing so that you can achieve
   in development exactly what you designed.

2.If you are given the designs and its like that you can modify some of the designs according to external/internal plugins provided by react-native. It would be wise to follow react-native as it has most of the components.

3. IF you are given the designs and you are asked to strictly follow the design, then it would be great problem if suppose even 1 component alternative is not present in react-native. So here you can opt for native coding and all.

So it all depends on design and functionalities.
So hence hope i did answer your question, would love any doubts,

I have been developing an Ionic App for the last months and have faced the problems you mention. In few words, if there is no plugin or the plugin has problems, you're screwed, meaning that, that you have to build (or fix) the plugin yourself.

The good thing with Ionic is that it is built on top of Cordova, wich belongs to Apache. They have quite a good collection of plugins that work perfectly in Ionic and are good maintained. They cover the main functionality.

Ionic self has a list of community plugins with quick instructions, you can find it here. Most of them work fine, some are buggy.
They also have a premium access (called Premier), which gives you access to official plugins and support, but this is extremely expensive.

Good news is: once you know how to do it, it is not difficult to build your own plugin (if you know JavaScript and the native code). It is not easy to find tutorials, though, specially knowing that Ionic versions differ a lot among them. This tutorial is a good starting point (check the bibliography at the bottom).

Not talking about native, but also about plugins in Ionic: sometimes I have also use Angular plugins, mostly successfully. About JS libraries, some work out of the box (like HammerJS), other I just could not make them work (like jQuery).

You are comparing entirely different frameworks here.

Ionic is just going to run inside WebView, it doesn't give native UX. So I wouldn't recommend it personally.

ReactNative gives you native UX but in oder to customize a plugin, you should know Java / Objective C or Swift. Even then it may be difficult to manage customisations over time. They do have a large number of community plugins, but again continuous support is something one can not guarantee.

On the other hand NativeScript gives you 100% access to device APIs using just JavaScript, you don't have to know native programming languages but still you would need some basic knowledge about marshalling the native code into JS / TS, they have a very good documentation on that.

In my opinion, you should choose ReactNative if you are completely relying on community plugins. If you are a good leaner (or your team), you may spend some time on building plugins, then you would love NativeScript. Customisations on plugins will be lot easier to manage, as it's mostly JavaScript you can always override the prototype chain and will not have to touch the original plugin code.