An Essential Beginners Guide For Ionic App Development

By Author: Copper Mobile
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With over seven million apps available across iOS and Android platforms, it’s no surprise that most business leaders are delving into a well-strategized cross-platform mobile application development with one of the fastest-growing app development frameworks – Ionic, to stand out from the competition and thrive in the marketplace.

Now, why tech leaders are majorly using Ionic Framework and how apps with ionic are helping businesses, let’s explore in this article.

An Introduction to Ionic

With over 5 million Ionic apps built and available in the market, Ionic is a go-to choice for more than 86% of mobile app developers.
If we come down to define, Ionic is a well-integrated, free, open-source UI toolkit utilized for building performant cross-platform apps that work on both mobile and desktop, using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, offering seamless integration with popular frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue at the backend.

Ionic came into existence in 2013 when three coders, Ben Sperry, Adam Bradley, and Max Lynch, built an open-source UI toolkit on AngularJS. Later ...
... on 25th July 2019, a stable version of Ionic – a cross-platform app development framework providing efficient performance with minimum DOM manipulation was released.

In essence, Ionic helps improve the frontend user experience of the applications by equipping cross-platform mobile app developers with numerous libraries of mobile-optimized UI components, tools, and gestures that can reciprocate impact and increase impact customer engagement of any enterprise application.

Ionic offers comprehensive mobile app development capabilities and spreads them across various platforms. And since every technology has its intricacies, Ionic has it too.

Pros of Ionic Framework –

What distinguishes Ionic from other mobile app development frameworks is its ability to create a single, easy-to-use JavaScript codebase, proffering developers’ freedom to implement the improvement tools without hustle.

Further, here are a few advantages of using Ionic for cross-platform application development:

No platform-specific dependency — One of the primary reasons Ionic is the most preferred cross-platform app development framework is its non-dependency on any platform. And this platform’s independency results in reduced development time and effort.

Extensive UI elements and quick prototyping — Ionic equips users with ready-to-go components that enable the creation of intuitive and functional apps within no time. The plenty of UI elements, web components, theme base, and typography lead users to focus more on the app’s features rather than on building UI components from time to time.

Strong Community Support — Another benefit of Ionic is the active community. Built on modern and popular technologies such as Cordova and Angular, Ionic has an immensely advanced and well-versed community to offer support to users while developing cross-platform apps.

Convenient Testing — When developing a cross-platform app with Ionic, developers can use Cordova commands to efficiently test the Ionic app on a desktop browser and perform simulator testing for iOS and Android apps.

Scalability — Ionic app development is the most preferred cross-platform app development for numerous reasons, but the scalability opportunity is one of the most significant. Developers leveraging Ionic can seamlessly scale their mobile app and advance the features without worrying about the number of active users and app performance.

Cons of Ionic Framework –

Plugin Dependent System — As read earlier, we know that Ionic offers a plethora of plugins to create intuitive and advanced cross-platform apps. But the drawback of being majorly dependent on plugins is that one only has to use the ready-made package of plugins to implement the required functionality. However, suppose a developer wants to build a native-specific feature for a non-standard piece of hardware. In that case, the user has to develop the plugin independently and transform it into Javascript. This means developers can go entirely web with Ionic, but it becomes a hassle when you want to go native.

Absence of Hot Reloading — With Ionic app development, one of the most daunting cons is the absence of hot reloading. When a developer adds features or does some change in codes due to the absence of a hot reload, the whole app refreshes and reloads to make changes active, slowing down the development speed.

Security threats — When building cross-platform applications, security is a common issue, as long as your app can be reverse engineered. While this isn’t the case with the newer updates of Ionic, using older versions doesn’t support code minification techniques. So, it is undoubtedly a notable point.

Performance — Developing an app using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and then integrating plugins and libraries means writing a lot of code, making the ionic app reasonably heavier than the native ones. And since Ionic uses web view to render apps, ionic app development is any day, a difficult choice for memory-intensive or complex applications.

At Copper Mobile, we’ve designed our business to be flexible; we know no two business problems are the same. With that in mind, we offer a range of services and engagement models to ensure we have a variety of ways to best serve our clients. Whether you need our help in one specific area or need us to bring all of our capabilities to the table, you can be sure we have the experience, expertise and flexibility to best serve you.