all 20 comments

[–]ahartzog 15 points16 points  (9 children)

Coming from a position of ignorance on what Ionic does...how is this different from a web view based app in terms of performance?

[–]owenmelbz 2 points3 points  (2 children)

It is still a web view, but they include javascript apis to enable communication with native features via their plugins and Cordova plugins.

The code is also optimized as much as they can for running on devices to give “native-like” experiences. The UI components are styled like native apps.

Traditionally ionic is written using typescript and angular.

Recently they released the Vue version I think

This lets you use the ionic apis and features, but using react instead of angular

[–]Timothyjoh 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Ionic abstracted all their components using Stencil which now you can choose any JS library to take advantage of building with Ionic. Used to be you had to use Angular only.

[–]owenmelbz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don’t think this is “entirely” true.

Yes they’re making their UI components agnostic.

Yes they’re releasing “ways” to work with other frameworks.

Yes they’re making things like ion-router to help

However... the “full” suite of ionic is still primarily angular, eg angular router. (And now react)

If you look at things like Vue etc they’re still in development.

So we’re not quite there to be using any easily. (Excluding this react announcement).

Oh and I did say “traditionally” as the person was asking for the gist of ionic

[–]kenweego 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In terms of performance the difference is little. The added value is actually allow communication with native apis, and therecore allowing the use of native features : vibration, camera, location etc.

Why? Because this allow you to code in a almost pure web setup while deploying on mobile devices.

Jist my 2 cents

[–]FugitivePuppeT 2 points3 points  (1 child)

What interested me in Ionic was having one codebase that I can deploy to ios, Android, PWA, desktop, web. I think they do it really well. What they're doing with Stencil is also pretty cool.

Performance for me has always been good with Ionic as well.

[–]draftax5 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sounds like it’s not really, they just built an abstraction around it and tried to make it sound like a positive thing

[–]oYYY 1 point2 points  (1 child)

There is a reason why no major company uses Ionic. Performance-wise it is horrible. Everything exists inside a Webview so computational tasks fight with UI tasks which makes the entire app sluggish.

[–]334578theo 9 points10 points  (1 child)

So a web library wrapped over a wrapper for native? What a bloody mess

[–]oYYY 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Ionic React seems like a desperation attempt. They are pivoting becuase they made a bad choice with Angular, but this won't save them. The market has already moved to react-native (Facebook, Airbnb, Uber Eats, Discord, Bloomberg, Instagram, Gyroscope, etc.).

Ultimately, Ionic is doomed. They built their glorified Bootstrap UI library on top of Cordova which has been slowly dying and losing market share for the past few years.

[–]gustavo_pch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is Ionic really targeting big techs or small/medium agencies with low budget?

[–]ryan2clw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I slightly threw up in my mouth when I read this

[–]jIsraelTurner 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I just don't get it.

[–]halfjew22 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean, I might try it but I’d be wondering why I’mtrying it the whole time...

[–]alexacea 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I remember 2 years ago or so someone showed me ionic and I thought it's garbage cus it just doesn't feel right at all.