NativeScript Device/API Access

Question

I was wondering just how much of an iOS and Android device can be accessed via NativeScript. Specifically, are there any limitations to what we can access and interact with, and if so, what are these limitations?

Reading through some of the docs, I can see we can access location and camera, but I'm wanting to know if we can see/use the likes of user settings such as font sizes, as well as peripherals, contacts list, etc.

Also, I'd like to know if we can create apps that are friendly to Assistive Technologies and that WIA-ARIA/WCAG compliant using element attributes such as role and describedby.

Many thanks

Answer 1

The beauty of NativeScript is that you can access the full native API.

When you're looking at the docs and see location and camera, that is because the Telerik guys and gals has written cross platform JS code to communicate with the native location/camera APIs of the platforms.

If you look at the code (here's the camera code for iOS) you can see that it's standard Javascript (well Typescript...) which communicates with the Object-C APIs.

You probably want to take a look at Chapter 6—Accessing Native APIs in the docs, and the blog post about using 3rd party modules (Cocoapods on iOS or Android Libraries).

To sum it up, if you can do it with Swift/Objective-C/Java code - you can do it with NativeScript.

I explained this in a seminar a couple of months back, take a look at this video, watch until about 19 minutes and you should get a hang of it.