Ionic — Richness of Mobile Apps and PWAs Redefined

Source: Ionic — Richness of Mobile Apps and PWAs Redefined

What is more delightful for a web developer than putting her web app developing skills into building a cross platform (Android, iOS, Windows) mobile application, and at the same time providing eye-catchy look and feel to the app? If you are one such aspirant of hybrid app development, Ionic is here to make your life easier. Ionic is an open-source SDK for hybrid mobile application development and is built on top of Angular and Apache Cordova.

What It Does

Ionic is an open source mobile SDK for developing native and progressive web apps (PWA) with ease. It is by far the richest framework for this purpose and rightfully so because it is a mixture of two very efficient frameworks, Cordova and Angular. It is based on Sass UI framework which is specifically designed and optimized for mobile operating systems that also provides lots of UI components for creating robust mobile applications.

And How

PWA is a web app that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience for users. It is responsive and on the other hand, native applications function only in their native environment or OS, for example, Android devices are home to Android apps and iPhones enable only iOS apps to run on them. These different environments use different programming languages for their respective app development. Instead of using Java for Android, Swift or Objective-C for iOS and C# for Windows, hybrid app building is the solution to develop cross platform applications that can run on several environments in one compilation. This is made possible by the Cordova Framework which basically wraps a web view made of web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Sass inside the native architecture of each platform.

Angular plays its part by providing dynamic structure and a high level of abstraction to the hybrid applications and lets the developer extend HTML components to applications. Simply put, if HTML had been designed for web applications, it would have been Angular.

Summing up these qualities, Ionic becomes the go-to framework for hybrid mobile app and PWA development. You can deploy your app as a PWA as well as native app and take advantage of both channels.

Similar Players

There is an alternative to anything and everything except yourself.

Having said that, the following are some similar JavaScript frameworks as Ionic. The edge that Ionic has is that it is more optimized towards Angular.

  • PhoneGap
  • Appcelerator Titanium
  • React Native
  • Onsen UI
  • jQuery Mobile
  • NativeScript

Why Ionic?

Source: Why Ionic?

Let us see what Ionic has in store for the developers as its key features and why one should choose Ionic for mobile app and PWA development using web technologies.

One Code Base, Run Everywhere
Ionic has made possible that the developer build the app with one code base and deploy it for multiple platforms. The native components of mobile operating systems like Android and iOS are wrapped within web components, hence this advantage.

Push Updates Remotely
Since the hybrid apps are basically running inside a web view, it is possible for the developers to push updates to their apps remotely through web instead of the conventional way of putting the update on App Store and leaving it to the user to choose whether or not to update the app. Using tools like Ionic Deploy and PhoneGap ContentSync, apps can be updated — at the web layer — remotely, outside of the App Store, though still in compliance with Apple and Android standards. Sending updates remotely makes sure that the user works with only an up-to-date app.

Fun and Fast Development
The fact that cross platform development is enabled by Ionic obviously paves the path for faster development. It saves a lot of time and effort that would otherwise have been required in native development methods. Building professional looking mobile applications in a comparatively less time while also keeping your code clean sure sounds fun.

Robust UI
The Sass UI framework provides robust and rich interface components for mobile applications. Ionic stands out for its visual optimization where the apps can be customized according to the platform with various UI features. Ionic apps tend to render native looking user interface in hybrid apps with fluidity.

Applications à la mode
Being in trend matters. According to the Developer Survey by Ionic in 2017, the number of hybrid-built apps is growing as a share of overall app development. In the next two years, 32.7% of developers surveyed expect to completely abandon native development in favor of hybrid. Currently, based on the same source, 31.5% of developers are targeting progressive web apps.

Have a look at the exact results of the survey here.

These insights point that web is the future and Ionic can be perceived as the ideal framework for building commercial apps, both for internal use and for clients.

Open Source Framework
The fruits of Ionic are just a click away since it is an open source framework. Ionic is available for installation to your PC at absolutely no cost. It is licensed under MIT and is powered by a world-wide community. The documentation of Ionic comprises of real app examples, component demos, guides, and how-to’s to get you up and running with mobile apps faster than ever before.

Level Up

AngularJS was upgraded to Angular 2 in a game changing move, and shortly to Angular 4 with certain operational edges over v2.0. Angular 2 is not just an update to Angular 1 but a totally different approach to JS development with better performance, more mobile oriented, use of TypeScript language in addition to ES5, ES6 and DART supported languages, many structural and syntactic changes. Pertaining to this change, Ionic was also upgraded to Ionic 2 so that it complies with Angular 2 and provides better development experience than its previous version.

Ionic Creator

Ionic Creator is a visual drag-and-drop tool for building Ionic applications. You can build a prototype, design the app, and even export some HTML and JavaScript from designer mode for the developer to work on.

Conclusion

While Ionic provides a flawless hybrid app and PWA development experience, the performance of Ionic apps is limited to resource utilization and high load. As long as Ionic is chosen for building largely CRUD based apps rather than video games or apps with higher resource utility, your decision is wise. In the dynamic world of app development, Ionic has sure found its niche to dominate and is here only to grow further.


Thoughtbees is a product and technology services company that enables Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to accelerate innovation through the adoption of Mobile and Cloud-Native strategies. We provide expertise in cloud readiness and implement disruptive cloud solutions within the most widely utilized technology platforms available today.

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