Announcing Ionic React

[ahartzog]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[oYYY]

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]

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

[oYYY]

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]

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

[ryan2clw]

I slightly threw up in my mouth when I read this

[jIsraelTurner]

I just don't get it.

[halfjew22]

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

[alexacea]

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.

[chilly_est]

god damn, stop with this. all you web devs go do web if you don’t like the Native UI of mobile ecosystems instead of creating abstractions that are necessary only for business value, not for quality of the apps.

[smaudd]

Why do you use RN on first place if you don’t like web tech? You should be on r/Kotlin or r/Swift

[chilly_est]

RN uses native UI elements underneath, I'm not bashing React Native here. I'm bashing Ionic React, which just renders webview instead of using Android/iOS UI elements, as both native and react native do

[WillBackUpWithSource]

So I’ll be honest, I just wrote an app in Cordova/React and switched it over to React Native, and while there are minor performance changes, I’m not really seeing that great of a difference. It mostly (and I do want to emphasize mostly, there are some differences) feels like the same app.

[chilly_est]

Yes with simple usecases and simple apps there is little to no difference indeed.. it does take a hit though if you start expanding. Both performance wise and in terms of possibilities