Developing Mobile Apps with Ionic Framework

For the past 5 years I have been developing mobile apps for Android Plaform. Recently, I got the chance to build an app using Ionic Framework. “Ionic Framework is an open source mobile UI toolkit for building high quality, cross-platform native and web app experiences”.

It was a pretty good experience working with Ionic. Ionic 5 supports React, Angular, Vue and Vanilla Javascipt, so any web developer can easily build mobile apps.

Setting up the environment for Ionic is easy Go to docs. Once development enviroment is setup run the project using this code.

 #start new project
$ ionic start

#run project in browser
$ ionic serve

Downside

Ionic does not have support for all the hardware capabilities and plugins may not be stable. The performance is good but not as good as native application. As there are stable libraries and support for android development it is not the same case for Ionic , specially when working with certain native features such as location, database, etc.

My Experience

Ionic and any other Hybrid App technology is not a replacement to native app development, but they can serve as a good alternative for companies with limited resource. Besides the cost, it will help with uniform code base across multiple platform. The best thing about Ionic is the ability to test your app in browser. You don’t need extra hardware or emulator to run your app. It has support for most of the hardware such as gps, fingerprint and many others. If used it can save time, money and resource.