I dont understand why they claim you can make native mobile apps with angular2 ionic and native are two very different things

Because of projects like https://www.nativescript.org/nativescript-is-how-you-build-n...

We also have a (community) react-native bridge, and of course all the awesome html5 stuff from Ionic.

Nativescript [1] allow for fully native (no native webview wrapper) apps being built with Angular 2 on top of Nativescript.

1. https://www.nativescript.org/

I'd love to hear the experiences and opinions of anyone who knows about building iOS and Android apps with NativeScript and Angular 2 [1], or who has used NativeScript [2] itself, please.

NativeScript has a JavaScript<=>Java bridge on Android, and a JavaScript<=>Objective C bridge on iOS, like a cross platform version of Apple's ObjC bridge used in OS/X JavaScript for Automation [3] [4] [5] (but AFAIK Apple's ObjC bridge is apparently not available for developers to use as a framework, nor on iOS, nor of course on Android).

Unlike React Native's JavaScript engine, it runs in the UI thread, using V8 on Android and JavaScriptCore on iOS, and you can call all the platform specific APIs directly, subclass and implement Java classes and Objective C classes and protocols, call methods and functions, and pass objects back and forth, write your own plugins in TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Objective C, etc.

[1] http://docs.nativescript.org/angular/tutorial/ng-chapter-0

[2] https://www.nativescript.org/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Int...

[4] http://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with-js

[5] http://developer.telerik.com/featured/javascript-os-x-automa...

http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/getting-started/flexbox/ praise jah

strikingly similar to WAD - https://github.com/rserota/wad

Webpack accomplishes everything you would need grunt/gulp for and is much more powerful. Grunt is essentially obsolete at this point

While true, that doesn't necessarily mean everyone needs to run off and learn Webpack. The treadmill of technologies in JS can be very exhausting so if Grunt is working for your project, why spend the cycles learning entirely new tooling?