Correct me if I'm wrong - it's been a while since I experimented with Ionic/Angular/Phonegap. and I haven't looked at React Native at all yet. But when I played around with Ionic/Angular, it REQUIRED phonegap. From what I've been reading, React Native does not require phonegap. So you can have React Native without PhoneGap, but you can't have Ionic/Angular without PhoneGap. So I think the correct comparison is, as this OP asks, React Native vs PhoneGap (regardless of the architecture/UI you use in PhoneGap)... Not React Native vs Ionic.