If you aren't going to use $scope.$watch, you might want to ask why you're using Angular in the first place. From my own experience building a large-ish hybrid

If you aren't going to use $scope.$watch, you might want to ask why you're using Angular in the first place. From my own experience building a large-ish hybrid mobile app in Angular, I haven't run into any performance issues. While you should of course understand the implications of how you structure your application, I would also warn against premature optimization. I advise building first for simplicity and ease of maintenance and then tweak for performance if needed.