I think it mainly depends on what you want to do in your application.
If all you want to do is pushing some data and images (e.g. create a shop platform) i don’t see any reason, why ionic wouldn’t do the job and probably you’d see results a bit faster, as you don’t need to struggle with a lot of native adaptions (such as file system access, etc…), though I don’t think that choosing xamarin would set you back in terms of X months more.
However if it comes to using native features, such as camera, gps, sensors, whatever you will probably be limited to what the ionic api offers and I don’t know how long the turnaround times will be until new features which may appear in the future are getting implemented into the framework.
Performancewise I am honestly sceptical if that mix of html, css and javascript/jquery will be anything comparable to what xamarin can get you to, as Xamarin actually produces an app which can compete with apps written natively.
I am not sure how deep you can get “under the hood” with ionic, though I know that with xamarin, you can actually go very deep and develop features that can use the native code of your target platform.
Actually by looking at the user base (or better to say the amount of questions here on stack overflow) one might be tempted that ionic has more questions than xamarin.forms, however that doesn’t take into account that actually any question about xamarin, xamarin.forms, xamarin.android, xamarin.ios and c# might hold relevant answers and support for your upcoming problems. However to be fair, also ionic has quite an impressive amount of q&a answers posted here, so i would say that is a draw.
My conclusion would be: If you need to create a data-pushing app fast, you could use ionic, however if you need performance, native methods and want to be able to use particular native features, Xamarin would hold that door open for you.
Disclaimer: I have been developing apps with xamarin forms for about 5 years now and have never used the ionic framework at all and therefore my knowledge about ionic is limited to what I read on summaries. Probably my answer might omit particular benefits that ionic might offer and I really hope that a more experienced ionic developer might have something beneficial to add.
However, If you were asking about my personal advice, My answer would be: Use Xamarin
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solved ionicFramework vs Xamarin.Forms [closed]