Architecture for android / ios app

Some_randomer

So I'm planning a single page read only app that displays a random piece of text to a user, with a next and previous button and a category drop down if a user wants to display text from a specific category. It'll be very simple - no user registration or anything like that. I'm an old school ASP.NET MVC / C# / JavaScript / Angular / SQL developer so that's my background. It's not going to change the world and I'm doing it primarily as a learning exercise to teach myself Ionic and / or Xamarin (whichever one turns out to be the most suitable), and I want to do it as best I can use best practice where possible.

I've already done the back end which is a single form to create / edit the pieces of text and save them to a SQL Express database. This is deployed on Azure and I'll be sending the link to friends to allow them to add the texts. I plan on having several hundred eventually and as they're being added and curated I'll start working on the front end. I won't necessarily use the SQL Express database for the front end part; if I decide to go with another data store I'll somehow import / shoehorn the text from the SQL db when the time comes.

So that's the background.. what I'm wondering now is the best way to architect this. I primarily see it being used on a phone so it would need to be lightweight and fast, particularly on the initial load and when users click the button to display the next piece of text. Some initial questions:

- If I use Xamarin to produce an android or ios app what's the best approach for data storage? So far I know nothing about app development so would they typically download / store data locally to the phone?
- Same question for Ionic - if I create it as a hybrid app where's the best place for the data? Would some kind of local storage make sense?
- Is there a typical architecture for this kind of app?
- Should I be looking at a NoSQL data store?

(I would ask this on Stackoverflow but they've gotten really arsey about the types of questions asked, and this would probably be flagged as too broad or opinion based or whatever).

TIA

jester77

With such a simple app, I would go native. You could use FireBase for storage, it is a realtime remote nosql DB that you can use natively with both android and ios. You then don't have to worry about local DB's as FireBase will handle all that for you.

W0LFMAN

Android/ios app linked to firebase. Use android studio for your android App. Or Xcode for your ios App.

If you do all the programming yourself. And your not data heavy in firebase. Won't cost you anything, but your time.