It’s time to switch from ionic framework

Ionic applications were a cost-effective and perfect alternative to native mobile application development. Ionic application basically runs JavaScript on top of WebView and interacts with native feature through Cordova plugins, which is essentially a website embedded inside a mobile app and runs on WebView. This works fine on high end phones but the biggest problem lies with low end phones.

With the recent technology shift towards enriched mobile application usage, Unlike relying on webview, javascript libraries are rendered using native components is react native answer to hybrid mobile application.

Risks in Ionic or any other hybrid framework relying on webview

Performance is the major issue due to high dependency on webview, the low end phones tends to fail rendering the application. Poorer user experience with slower animations, lack of platform-specific gesture recognition, and keyboard misbehaviour. Another problem is css styles working differently across browsers

Apple continuous change in guidelines, recent guideline 4.2.6

Before, the 4.2.6 App Store guideline read as follows:

4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialised template or app generation service will be rejected.

Revised Word States :

4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialised template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app’s content. These services should not submit apps on behalf of their clients and should offer tools that let their clients create customised, innovative apps that provide unique customer experiences. Another acceptable option for template providers is to create a single binary to host all client content in an aggregated or “picker” model, for example as a restaurant finder app with separate customised entries or pages for each client restaurant, or as an event app with separate entries for each client event.

This doesn't effect apps built using ionic framework but this clearly proves that apple has no problem in restricting apps built by any major framework even with huge app base, back in days it did the same with flash developers. In addition to the above, another major concern is Security and liability with apps running in webview and apple at some point may start rejecting apps which completely rely on webview.

Alternative to Ionic or any other hybrid framework relying on webview : -

There are lots of frameworks that are compiling into native components like the facebook react native, google flutter etc..,

React Native :- React native is good in performance and recently received a lot of recognition, and thanks to facebook it now has a huge community base. Some of the apps which are built using react native are Facebook Events Dashboard in ios , Skype , Instagram , Uber Eats

Google Flutter :- Flutter is google’s answer to facebook’s react framework which was released few weeks ago. However, Flutter uses dart programming language which has negligible developer base.

React native is great but it is maintained by Facebook, but we know what happened to parse.com in past.

So what is the future for Ionic Framework

Ionic has got capacitor and has recently released an alpha version of capacitor, it is a cross-platform app runtime that makes it easy to build web apps that run natively on iOS, Android, Electron, and the web. They are calling this Native Progressive Web Apps. In the docs they have clearly mentioned that it is inspired from react framework. However, it is too early to conclude that capacitor could be the next potential alternative to ionic.

All these frameworks clearly suggest that hybrid apps are going to become obsolete and it time to switch from hybrid application using webview.