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Sad to see Ionic in the avoid category. Their latest release I thought was quite polished, and I've enjoyed using Capacitor rather than Cordova. I think the key

Sad to see Ionic in the avoid category. Their latest release I thought was quite polished, and I've enjoyed using Capacitor rather than Cordova. I think the key to further success is breaking away from Cordova entirely, and expanding the native features supported in Capacitor. Right now I find myself having to use both due to some things not being implemented in Capacitor yet.

warent 7y ago
At this point with React Native (or even Flutter if we're considering things apart from JS) there really isn't a compelling reason to build anything in a Webview as far as I know. Also in my personal experience their support team members have been pretty impatient and passive aggressive in the Github issues tickets so I'm not entirely surprised that they're building something that the community has moved away from.
- kayoone 7y ago
  Not an expert, but the multiplatform story for ionic is pretty nice. One codebase to run on iOS/Android and Web is easiest with ionic and I see a lot of small-mid size businesses using it. It's usually not about top-of-their class apps though.
- virtualwhys 7y ago
  > there really isn't a compelling reason to build anything in a Webview as far as I know. Neither RN nor Flutter fulfill the promise of, "write once, run everywhere", whereas Ionic, warts and all, does today. Maybe Flutter web will work out though, we'll see. If Dart evolves then Flutter becomes a pretty compelling stack.
- yesimahuman 7y ago
  There are a ton of compelling reasons to build apps targeting mobile web views, and despite Ionic's poor showing on this survey, we are seeing a lot of serious apps and brands doing so and picking it explicitly because of those benefits. Perhaps the biggest is the overlap with web dev tech, team skill makeup, and the hiring market for web devs being incredibly vibrant. Vast majority of teams have struggled to go native and build/hire those teams, and are instead excited about using the web devs they already have or taking advantage of that hiring market. One trend that is really interesting is that many teams have decided they need to be prepared for a PWA future and can't afford to have two separate efforts to accomplish that (i.e. app store apps and PWA). They see Ionic as a way to do both and be ready for the expansion of PWA adoption which is early but happening fairly organically, and has some key enterprise benefits that make it attractive for those teams. Sorry you had a bad experience on our github issues. We're a small team relative to the size of the community and have had to resort to automation and tooling to figure out signal from noise. It's been a constant process of iteration on that front.
bobajeff 7y ago
I've tried Native with a Kotlin, Flutter, and Ionic 4 with Angular and then Ionic 4 again but with Stencil. Out of all of them I'd probably gotten the farthest with Ionic 4 + Angular but I wouldn't recommend either of them. Right now I'm trying no framework approach to make a web app with intension on using Cordova or Capacitor to hook into native Tensorflow.
yesimahuman 7y ago
We’re sad to see it as well, especially because our recent releases have been so well received. I fear people formed their opinion years ago, especially with the move to Angular 2, and it’s been harder to get those people back. Oh well, we’re focused on continuing to make improvements and moving harder toward Capacitor and so far the community has been responding very well. The other thing happening with Ionic is that our enterprise business has been doing very well. We’ve added hundreds of enterprise customers in the last two years and have really built a solid offering for medium to large businesses. We’ve also seen more and more huge apps built on the platform. I’m guessing our focus on enterprise has also cost us a bit in this survey. Been a learning experience how to balance that and convey to folks we are both an OSS and enterprise co And seeing angular in the “analyze” category makes me think the sample of folks responding to this survey are in a certain bubble that does not map to the broader dev ecosystem we see every day, so there’s that.

warent 7y ago

At this point with React Native (or even Flutter if we're considering things apart from JS) there really isn't a compelling reason to build anything in a Webview as far as I know. Also in my personal experience their support team members have been pretty impatient and passive aggressive in the Github issues tickets so I'm not entirely surprised that they're building something that the community has moved away from.

kayoone 7y ago
Not an expert, but the multiplatform story for ionic is pretty nice. One codebase to run on iOS/Android and Web is easiest with ionic and I see a lot of small-mid size businesses using it. It's usually not about top-of-their class apps though.
virtualwhys 7y ago
> there really isn't a compelling reason to build anything in a Webview as far as I know. Neither RN nor Flutter fulfill the promise of, "write once, run everywhere", whereas Ionic, warts and all, does today. Maybe Flutter web will work out though, we'll see. If Dart evolves then Flutter becomes a pretty compelling stack.
yesimahuman 7y ago
There are a ton of compelling reasons to build apps targeting mobile web views, and despite Ionic's poor showing on this survey, we are seeing a lot of serious apps and brands doing so and picking it explicitly because of those benefits. Perhaps the biggest is the overlap with web dev tech, team skill makeup, and the hiring market for web devs being incredibly vibrant. Vast majority of teams have struggled to go native and build/hire those teams, and are instead excited about using the web devs they already have or taking advantage of that hiring market. One trend that is really interesting is that many teams have decided they need to be prepared for a PWA future and can't afford to have two separate efforts to accomplish that (i.e. app store apps and PWA). They see Ionic as a way to do both and be ready for the expansion of PWA adoption which is early but happening fairly organically, and has some key enterprise benefits that make it attractive for those teams. Sorry you had a bad experience on our github issues. We're a small team relative to the size of the community and have had to resort to automation and tooling to figure out signal from noise. It's been a constant process of iteration on that front.

bobajeff 7y ago

I've tried Native with a Kotlin, Flutter, and Ionic 4 with Angular and then Ionic 4 again but with Stencil. Out of all of them I'd probably gotten the farthest with Ionic 4 + Angular but I wouldn't recommend either of them. Right now I'm trying no framework approach to make a web app with intension on using Cordova or Capacitor to hook into native Tensorflow.

yesimahuman 7y ago

We’re sad to see it as well, especially because our recent releases have been so well received. I fear people formed their opinion years ago, especially with the move to Angular 2, and it’s been harder to get those people back. Oh well, we’re focused on continuing to make improvements and moving harder toward Capacitor and so far the community has been responding very well. The other thing happening with Ionic is that our enterprise business has been doing very well. We’ve added hundreds of enterprise customers in the last two years and have really built a solid offering for medium to large businesses. We’ve also seen more and more huge apps built on the platform. I’m guessing our focus on enterprise has also cost us a bit in this survey. Been a learning experience how to balance that and convey to folks we are both an OSS and enterprise co And seeing angular in the “analyze” category makes me think the sample of folks responding to this survey are in a certain bubble that does not map to the broader dev ecosystem we see every day, so there’s that.