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Normal people don’t know the difference and even experienced people can be fooled. Anecdote: I have an Ionic app that is used by 15,000 people daily. It looks

by WA 8y ago

Normal people don’t know the difference and even experienced people can be fooled. Anecdote: I have an Ionic app that is used by 15,000 people daily. It looks like a native app. Nobody ever wrote me an email that the app is not native, not fast enough or anything else. Normal people want to get their shit done and move on. Heck, one user apparently was a dev and came up with a suggestion (enable keyboard suggestions for text input fields) and he wrote me specifically which iOS UI element I should choose over some other element he thought I was using. I replied: thanks, but this is an Ionic app, it doesn’t use native iOS elements ;) Native apps are totally overrated imho, unless you make heavy use of fine-grained input controls. Here, Ionic does have its limits. You can’t control the keyboard properly for example, unless you wire in some Cordova plugins. Oh and JS doesn’t run in the background. This can cause issues if you do a lot of background processing. But performance is not much of an issue anymore in 2018 and Ionic is the most polished web-based framework that is tough to distinguish from native apps.

yesimahuman 8y ago
(Ionic CEO here) Thanks for the response and sharing your experience. I also have not heard any feedback that iOS users find Ionic's iOS styles jarring. Ionic is also meant to be customized and branded quite a bit, so stock native style isn't really what we're after anyways. A priority for us in 2019 is making keyboard and background processing easier!
- virmundi 8y ago
  I phrased that poorly. I personally liked the look of Ionic. I read Medium post after Medium post while researching telling me I'm crazy to use Ionic since iOS people pay for apps and demand native appearance.
  - yesimahuman 8y ago
    Interesting, well considering even a side menu isn’t official Apple UI that might be a case of native engineers projecting their own opinions on developers. Hard to say
- WA 8y ago
  Interesting. I haven’t written more than 5 lines of custom CSS. Besides changing the primary color, it’s all Ionic stock styles.
saagarjha 8y ago
Just curious, what app is this? I’ve generally been of the opinion that it’s very hard to make native-looking Ionic apps.
- WA 8y ago
  Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I won’t post my app here, since this leads to opinionated discussions that serve no purpose. You will always find something that looks off (but you can find off-looking things also in pure native apps). So to turn the question back to you: what bothers you and what makes it hard to have native-looking apps?
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I took a look at this again today, using a demo I found online: http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/ http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/, which I converted to a web app by adding it to my homescreen. Please let me know if this isn't representative of the current state of Ionic development. Here's just a few of the things that seemed broken/were wrong: * I can't scroll to the top by tapping the top of the screen. * The appearance and behavior of the search bar is incorrect. * The size of the segmented control in the navigation bar is incorrect. * Scrolling the menu frequently breaks completely–as in, I can't scroll at all. This also happens in the "Filter sessions" page. * Swiping on switches doesn't match the system behavior: I should not be able to move it until I lift my finger. The animation that changes the switches from "wide" to "circular" isn't correct either. * I broke the scrollbar insets on the support page. * I can scroll the navigation bar out of the viewport. * The background color for pickers is wrong. * The location from where a backwards swipe can begin is wrong. * The touch target on bar buttons is too small. * There is no vibrancy at all. And from a stylistic point of view: * Floating action buttons are for Android, not iOS. * Hamburger menus that duplicate the function of the tab bar are frowned upon. * Table view selection isn't correct–it deselects itself too quickly. * Buttons should be render before the view loads, not after.

by WA 8y ago

yesimahuman 8y ago

(Ionic CEO here) Thanks for the response and sharing your experience. I also have not heard any feedback that iOS users find Ionic's iOS styles jarring. Ionic is also meant to be customized and branded quite a bit, so stock native style isn't really what we're after anyways. A priority for us in 2019 is making keyboard and background processing easier!

virmundi 8y ago
I phrased that poorly. I personally liked the look of Ionic. I read Medium post after Medium post while researching telling me I'm crazy to use Ionic since iOS people pay for apps and demand native appearance.
- yesimahuman 8y ago
  Interesting, well considering even a side menu isn’t official Apple UI that might be a case of native engineers projecting their own opinions on developers. Hard to say
WA 8y ago
Interesting. I haven’t written more than 5 lines of custom CSS. Besides changing the primary color, it’s all Ionic stock styles.

saagarjha 8y ago

Just curious, what app is this? I’ve generally been of the opinion that it’s very hard to make native-looking Ionic apps.

WA 8y ago
Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I won’t post my app here, since this leads to opinionated discussions that serve no purpose. You will always find something that looks off (but you can find off-looking things also in pure native apps). So to turn the question back to you: what bothers you and what makes it hard to have native-looking apps?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I took a look at this again today, using a demo I found online: http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/ http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/, which I converted to a web app by adding it to my homescreen. Please let me know if this isn't representative of the current state of Ionic development. Here's just a few of the things that seemed broken/were wrong: * I can't scroll to the top by tapping the top of the screen. * The appearance and behavior of the search bar is incorrect. * The size of the segmented control in the navigation bar is incorrect. * Scrolling the menu frequently breaks completely–as in, I can't scroll at all. This also happens in the "Filter sessions" page. * Swiping on switches doesn't match the system behavior: I should not be able to move it until I lift my finger. The animation that changes the switches from "wide" to "circular" isn't correct either. * I broke the scrollbar insets on the support page. * I can scroll the navigation bar out of the viewport. * The background color for pickers is wrong. * The location from where a backwards swipe can begin is wrong. * The touch target on bar buttons is too small. * There is no vibrancy at all. And from a stylistic point of view: * Floating action buttons are for Android, not iOS. * Hamburger menus that duplicate the function of the tab bar are frowned upon. * Table view selection isn't correct–it deselects itself too quickly. * Buttons should be render before the view loads, not after.