7 Reasons why Ionic can Dictate the Future of Hybrid App Development

In the fragmented landscape of mobile app development frameworks. Where on one side some platforms attract developers because of their native performance gains. On the other side, the HTML-based frameworks have always made developers think twice about even choosing them.

But unlike other cross-platform frameworks, Ionic has been gaining consistent popularity and the framework has become the de facto standard in hybrid app development. Following are some convincing features which will let you choose Ionic for your hybrid app.

Cross Platform

Unlike native frameworks, where you might have to write separate code for many of your features to cater different mobile platforms, increasing your time and cost. The Ionic framework offers you to use exact same code base for all the supported mobile platforms eventually saving you a ton of development and maintenance time and giving you cost benefits.

Free of cost

Ionic is open sourced and available under MIT license which grants permission, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software, to deal in the Software without restriction. In simpler words, you can use Ionic commercially without even paying a dime. Being open source, it has attracted if not hundreds but thousands of developers worldwide. Thus it is being developed and maintained by the best of the minds in the world.

Strong Ecosystem

Ionic doesn’t come with one compressed file of the framework and make you do the heavy lifting of creating builds, setting up environments and do packaging by installing tons of other libraries and tools. It rather has one of the strongest ecosystems of supporting tools and services.

The Ionic CLI is Node based command line tool with which developers can perform app related tasks like bootstrapping, running, debugging and packaging apps with very simple and easy to remember commands. The Ionic Creator allows to create Ionic apps visually with simple drag and drop functionality. Even sharing your work with your clients and testers has been made easy with the Ionic View app and that too without beta provisioning.

Based on Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is an open-sourced app packaging framework, which is being used by many other frameworks and therefore has become one of the standards in hybrid app development.

It allows developers to use standard web technologies – HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development. Cordova itself has a great community of developers and plugins which allow developers to access the native functionality of the platform on which application is running. Giving you the freedom of implementing some native platform-specific features for your app.

Low learning curve

Ionic uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for ionic app development and JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. Millions of developers around the world are working on web apps using the same technology stack. Therefore leveraging existing technologies and the knowledge they already have, Ionic has made the transition easy for web developers to start building hybrid mobile apps.

Angular 2 and TypeScript

Ionic app development has been made easy due to the Angular 2 and Typescript support. Angular 2 is itself supported by Google and Angular has become the most popular single page application (SPA) framework in the world. It provides many features that make the app development a breeze.

In addition to that, Angular 2 has improved performance significantly. Therefore by using Angular 2 Ionic is leveraging all the recent progress. Moreover, Typescript lowers the learning curve for people working only with the statically typed languages. Making the transition easier for developers who have been working with languages like Java or C#.

Strong Community Support

There are times when smallest bug can take your whole day, just because the documentation provided isn’t sufficient or there are not enough forums where you can ask for help. It’s not the case with Ionic app development.

Ionic provides a very detailed documentation and easy tutorials to get started. They host a forum as well where developers around the world are ready to help you 24/7.

Considering all those aforementioned reasons when choosing the framework to build hybrid apps, Ionic therefore has become the default choice of the developers to build their cross-platform mobile apps.