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The myth that Ionic is slower than react native (android native - > skia ) or flutter (skia) has to stop. The evidence isn't just there anymore, chromium is the

The myth that Ionic is slower than react native (android native - > skia ) or flutter (skia) has to stop. The evidence isn't just there anymore, chromium is the open source library with the most human resources on earth (mlre than 1 million commits) and therefore has more optimization resources than any competitor. The addition of edpressivity through new features in newer releases does not slow the browser despite the very infantile and hand wavey idea of "bloat" that many HN readers share. In fact Ionic should be even faster than Electron since it embed many modern optimization practices inside the UI framework. Unfortunately it seems people have zero interest doing serious benchmarking of similar tasks on multiple GUI renderers so the myth stay pervasive. What is sure is that you will never actually have significant performance issues in Ionic or otherwise you're doing something wrong. Still the myth allows react native and flutter to survive relevancy despite their major ergonomics and expressive inferiority, but for how long? People are used to experience that Electron apps are usually better and faster. The smartphones double standard will break.

samwillis 5y ago
Completely agree with you on performance, certainly on any mobile device with less than 5yo tech. I think there are still a few performance problems on older/low-end hardware, that’s why for social media type apps I would recommend native. You would have the same perf problems with Flutter and React Native on that hardware. I have only one significant complaint that effects Capacitor on iOS and it’s a WebKit bug (Ionic can’t fix it). With WebKit on iOS if you have an overflow:scroll with a text input of any kind (basically any app you build) the text cursor or selection highlight will remain visible outside the overflow area when you scroll. So for example if you select text in an input and scroll the view so the input is under a fixed toolbar, the selection highlight or cursor is visible infront of the toolbar. It looks very messy, I wish Apple would fix it. The minute you see it you know it’s not a native app.
sirwhinesalot 5y ago
> Electron apps are usually faster. Not my experience, and I'm not talking benchmarks. That said I barely use my phone and I'm thinking mainly about desktop applications. Mac-native apps are universally faster and more responsive than Electron-based equivalents. Doing more work costs more resources than doing less work, and it's hard to beat JITing Javascript and manipulating and rendering HTML+CSS for wasteful computation, no matter how much you optimize it. That said, I've used phone apps that were essentially some webpage in webview that were highly responsive and pleasant to use, so it's certainly possible to have a good experience with webapps. Reducing the amount of Javascript and using simpler HTML+CSS would also probably go a long way to make these apps fasters and lighter. I remember using AJAX-based chat websites in the 2000s that ran perfectly fine on hardware far weaker than even a 5 year old phone, so how the heck does Slack have such poor performance? That's the real problem.
realusername 5y ago
> Still the myth allows react native and flutter to survive relevancy despite their major ergonomics and expressive inferiority, but for how long? People are used to experience that Electron apps are usually better and faster. My concern with Ionic/React native isn't speed (I'm sure it's good enough), it's maintainability. I've been burned enough by the JS ecosystem to stay away from it when I can. It usually takes around 1 hour to update 6 months worth of Flutter framework & packages updates, I can't say the same about the javascript ecosystem. On paper it looks awesome, in practice I just don't want to deal with those maintenance issues anymore.
- samwillis 5y ago
  I think the majority of Ionic apps have been built with Angular, which I believe has had a fairly clean upgrade path. The React and Vue binding are newer but both aren’t to hard to upgrade (ignoring the vue2-3 transition, Ionic only ever supported 3) Plus, with Ionic in contrast to the majority of JavaScript frameworks, you are using one built by a company where the framework is the core business. They have a long track record and sustainable business. They aren’t going anywhere.
  - realusername 5y ago
    Maybe I've been a bit unfair and I should give it a go, I just had so many bad maintainability experiences in the JS world that I was just staying away from it if I can.

samwillis 5y ago

Completely agree with you on performance, certainly on any mobile device with less than 5yo tech. I think there are still a few performance problems on older/low-end hardware, that’s why for social media type apps I would recommend native. You would have the same perf problems with Flutter and React Native on that hardware. I have only one significant complaint that effects Capacitor on iOS and it’s a WebKit bug (Ionic can’t fix it). With WebKit on iOS if you have an overflow:scroll with a text input of any kind (basically any app you build) the text cursor or selection highlight will remain visible outside the overflow area when you scroll. So for example if you select text in an input and scroll the view so the input is under a fixed toolbar, the selection highlight or cursor is visible infront of the toolbar. It looks very messy, I wish Apple would fix it. The minute you see it you know it’s not a native app.

sirwhinesalot 5y ago

> Electron apps are usually faster. Not my experience, and I'm not talking benchmarks. That said I barely use my phone and I'm thinking mainly about desktop applications. Mac-native apps are universally faster and more responsive than Electron-based equivalents. Doing more work costs more resources than doing less work, and it's hard to beat JITing Javascript and manipulating and rendering HTML+CSS for wasteful computation, no matter how much you optimize it. That said, I've used phone apps that were essentially some webpage in webview that were highly responsive and pleasant to use, so it's certainly possible to have a good experience with webapps. Reducing the amount of Javascript and using simpler HTML+CSS would also probably go a long way to make these apps fasters and lighter. I remember using AJAX-based chat websites in the 2000s that ran perfectly fine on hardware far weaker than even a 5 year old phone, so how the heck does Slack have such poor performance? That's the real problem.

realusername 5y ago

> Still the myth allows react native and flutter to survive relevancy despite their major ergonomics and expressive inferiority, but for how long? People are used to experience that Electron apps are usually better and faster. My concern with Ionic/React native isn't speed (I'm sure it's good enough), it's maintainability. I've been burned enough by the JS ecosystem to stay away from it when I can. It usually takes around 1 hour to update 6 months worth of Flutter framework & packages updates, I can't say the same about the javascript ecosystem. On paper it looks awesome, in practice I just don't want to deal with those maintenance issues anymore.

samwillis 5y ago
I think the majority of Ionic apps have been built with Angular, which I believe has had a fairly clean upgrade path. The React and Vue binding are newer but both aren’t to hard to upgrade (ignoring the vue2-3 transition, Ionic only ever supported 3) Plus, with Ionic in contrast to the majority of JavaScript frameworks, you are using one built by a company where the framework is the core business. They have a long track record and sustainable business. They aren’t going anywhere.
- realusername 5y ago
  Maybe I've been a bit unfair and I should give it a go, I just had so many bad maintainability experiences in the JS world that I was just staying away from it if I can.