Businesses emphasize providing a unique user experience and attracting potential customers. One crucial way to make it happen is to provide an exciting and engaging mobile app. Thus, businesses are investing in developing and marketing mobile apps to expand their market presence and reach as many potential customers as possible.
The actual process just starts with the thought of having a mobile app. It comes with several steps that any business must consider before they jump into the process.
But, the question arises of which technology and platform to choose to make development easier and quicker. Today, you can find several potential options to come up with next-gen mobile apps to make a huge difference and compete with top competitors.
Building a mobile app is tricky as you must make sure that the app will run on all platforms seamlessly.
To provide an all-rounder solution to every developer’s need, the Ionic framework has it all. Recently, it has gained much popularity and bagged the top position among other alternatives.
To get started with Ionic App Development, you must understand the basics of it. Try this framework at least once to taste all its features and functionalities.
Ionic framework- Write code once, and use it anywhere
You can estimate its popularity with more than 48.4k stars and 13.6k forks on GitHub. Though it was introduced in 2013, it still made its way to the top frameworks to develop the most unique, innovative, and robust PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and mobile apps leveraging web technologies like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
To help you with your challenges of developing high-quality cross-platform mobile apps, Ionic is the way to go.
Initially, Ionic was launched as an open-source software development kit (SDK) for hybrid mobile applications.
Today, Ionic is powering more than 5 million applications globally. All credit to its platform-specific user interface (UI) elements, which is a vast library of native components for both iOS and Android platforms, as well as progressive web apps. Such features result in a robust design system for fast, efficient, and economical mobile apps.
Ionic is designed to integrate with all the popular front-end frameworks seamlessly perfectly, such as HTML, CSS, Angular, React, Vue, etc.
Over time several versions were introduced to improve Ionic and provide efficient features for smooth development.
- Ionic V1- introduced in 2015, developed under Angular1 based on JavaScript.
- Ionic V2- introduced in 2016, used Angular2 with TypeScript with some changes in the development pattern. In this version, classes were used rather than controllers. Changes were made in template syntax and class structure.
- Ionic V3- introduced in 2017, used semantic versioning with Angular4 and was compatible with Typescript 2.1 and 2.2. Its core features are- lazy loading and page decorator, improved performance, and speed of apps.
- Ionic V4- introduced in 2019. This version marked high performance, improved build time, multi-framework compatibility, powerful theming capabilities, and new documentation.
- Ionic Framework V5 (Magnesium)- introduced in 2020, comes with Ionic Native and a Capacitor and Cordova plugins to maximize native functionality to support standard APIs and integration.
- Ionic V6- introduced in 2022, with new component features, bottom sheet modal, revamped ion-datetime, and declarative overlays.
There have been many improvements made to provide a better development experience.
Reasons to adopt Ionic for Mobile App Development
Below are core reasons that made developers’ life easier. Let’s explore more.
A Single Codebase for All Platforms
Ionic’s key feature is a single codebase, letting you run your application on any platform. On top of it, Ionic allows you to create innovative mobile apps without having native developers at your end. If you have hands-on experience with Angular, you can quickly get along with Ionic to build fully-functional applications.
Having a single codebase will help in
- Reducing the cost of developing different mobile app versions for different platforms, hiring native devs, and codebase maintenance.
- You can transform your Ionic-built application into a desktop app or PWA with a single codebase.
- It helps develop and deliver apps to clients quickly, as you do not need to create separate codes for different platforms.
- With its built-in browser instruments and debugging tools, it ensures easy maintenance of apps.
Easy to Use
Another important reason is that the Ionic framework is easier to use with a shorter learning curve. Because ionic uses the commonly used web technologies, every developer might understand and know how to work, such as HTML, TypeScript, CSS, and others.
As a developer, you have various framework options, eliminating the need to learn a platform’s native coding language and yet still develop apps with full native functionality.
Integrations and Plugins Galore
The ionic framework supports many integrations for improved and extensive functionalities. These integrations help developers to include features for building a next-gen mobile app.
Several integrations offer functionalities, such as analytics, payment, security, testing, and others. You can also use Ionic to integrate software and hardware components.
Extensive Component Library
Ionic is well-known for its extensive component library that developers can use as ready-made elements for creating outstanding user interfaces.
If you pair these components with web components, you can quickly speed up the development process while helping retain the native look.
These elements make development more accessible as you can add these components directly without coding them into your app. It lets you create prototypes of your application faster using Ionic Creator, a drag-and-drop builder, for building interactive prototypes.
This component library saves resources and time while maintaining the native look and feel of the app.
Testing is Easy
To eliminate all potential bugs and issues with your ionic app. You will get an easy testing feature. Rigorous testing is part of the app development and becomes more accessible with the Ionic framework.
You can manage testing easily by running your test apps on a desktop browser or simulator. Testing your apps before launching them will help solve potential issues quickly before they migrate to production, resulting in additional fixation costs.
Exhaustive Documentation
For beginners and new developers, documentation is the way to learn and understand the basics of any language and framework. With ionic, you will get easy documentation to help you get the best out of it. Ionic has invested time, money, and effort in creating a well-structured pool of information to make it easier for users to troubleshoot any issues.
The documentation has everything from explanations to detailed guides and tutorials to get along with the ionic framework, such as configurations on different platforms and installations.
Extensive and robust Community
Ionic is an open-source platform that has allowed its developers to make new improvements to its source code and include new functionalities. It is a comprehensive community with more than 5 million developers actively maintaining ionic frameworks.
If you are ever stuck with documentation, you will get all answers to your problems here.
Ionic mobile app development with OnGraph
Understanding the potential and immense capabilities of the ionic framework, companies are providing Ionic App development Services. The ionic framework is the way to create innovative and highly user-interactive mobile apps.
The ionic framework has a bright future due to its ease of getting along and integrating top third-party plugins for more functionalities.
If you are struggling to find any Ionic Development Company, you must tie up with OnGraph for better, quick, and scalable development services.