Top 7 Reasons to Pick IONIC Framework for Mobile Apps
Companies do understand the dominance of mobile apps and they are finding all ways to provide their customers the convenience of using their services/products and approaching them on the go.
But the big decision for these companies is to choose the right platform to develop their apps. Since the beginning of app development, native apps had an edge over hybrid apps, while the later was often criticised for sluggish performance and immature user interface. These remarks might stay true till a few years back, but things have changed radically for the hybrid apps since the arrival of IONIC platform. IONIC has streamlined the development of multi-platform applications, bringing a classy feel to the space of hybrid apps. Here are a few good reasons to pick IONIC framework.
Open source and absolutely free
The downside of using an open source is usually getting stuck with an unstable framework that’s prone to break. But wait till you see Ionic, it’s pretty stable, faster, and reliable and simulate a native feel efficiently. Let’s accept it, developing an app is a costly affair, right from research to design to development to marketing. Frameworks can actually burn a hole in your pocket, on the contrary, Ionic costs you nothing. Furthermore, learning the framework is easy as designing a mobile web page that is made to run in an app-like shell.
Developers love it
Who doesn’t love creating an interface where you can just pick and choose the different elements instead of coding them individually? Ionic framework has this advantage where you can use a set of default UI elements. Forms, filters, action sheets, navigation menu, list views, tab bars and other UI paradigms are easily available for developers to use in their design. Hence, developers can focus on building apps rather than breaking their head over the common UI elements. Moreover, the code is reusable so developers can build an app for all major operating systems with ease. The default UI is clean and you can add a personal touch to your app by including CSS classes.
Big and helpful community
It’s not an easy to start out with a new framework, sometimes it’s a challenge for even experts to figure out things. Ionic, being built on the top of popular technologies such as Cordova and Angular, has a huge and active community. So, for all your questions, there’s always an existing blog post about it or members eager to help on forums. You can even try posting your app questions on social media and if you are lucky, you never know, you might get your answers from the founders of Ionic framework.
Angular is here to save
Angular is a very popular framework for creating both mobile and web apps. Ionic uses AngularJS for providing application structure, taking advantage of its several features. It uses the syntax extending of HTML to include components of app and data binding. JavaScript based AngularJS framework allows user to build high performance mobile apps on Ionic platform.
One code for all
Building native apps for both iOS and Android means investing a good amount of time learning two completely different languages. With Ionic, comes the flexibility of building cross platform apps without any problem. It’s far more easier to build high-end user interfaces with added functionalities and reuse the same code to build apps for different platforms. As the rewriting of code is not required, it saves a lot of time and effort.
Cordova plugins
Are you aware that plugins are a small piece of code, in JavaScript format, attached to your app enabling it to perform multiple things like a native app. Cordova plugins do the wonder for Ionic, giving access to different features of the operating system such as battery, pro-location, camera, access to logs and more. These plugins enhance the overall performance of apps and this only involves adding a few simple codes to your development.
User Interface
Hybrid apps are often criticized for being ugly, but Ionic has changed this. The CSS and Javascript support gives you higher customisation options for buttons, menus, colour schemes, etc. It has really high standards of UI elements plus features like Right to Left language support for publishing your apps in multiple languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu etc. Moreover, Ionic also supports the depth, motion, and vibrant colors of the material design for a beautiful looking UI.
Testing is easy
Mobile app testing is far more easier with Ionic. You could test in on a desktop browser or even perform simulator testing for both iOS and Android apps using Cordova commands. You can even do testing with a mobile browser or safari in iOS devices. You can even do a remote debugging. You can even test the app directly as a native or hybrid app on the actual platform to get an actual idea on how the app would run.
Summing up…
Ionic framework has been created to bridge the gap between AngularJS web apps and hybrid mobile apps. It takes advantage of the rich AngularJS and Cordova library for developing highly interactive hybrid applications. Turned out to be a lifesaver for the hybrid app development, it provides native like UI components that can be mould in the framework for iOS, Android and other platforms.
Wanna explore the scope of Ionic powered hybrid apps for your product, Inkoniq would love to help you.
