The Ionic framework was created by Drifty Co. in 2013. And by 2015, the Ionic developers had created more than 1.3 million applications with its SDK. Today, Ionic is a state-of-the-art technology recognized worldwide. But what is Ionic and how did it become such a big success?

Ionic is a fully open source SDK for the development of hybrid mobile applications, which use technologies such as CSS, HTML5 and SASS. However, most applications created through the Ionic Framework are progressive web applications, which close the gap between native mobile apps and mobile web apps.

In general, a PWA provides a collection of web technologies and APIs that provide the user with an experience similar to the mobile web app, but with the robustness and robustness of the native app. Ionic Framework is especially suitable for PWAs because it freed mobile developers from using native coding to create Android, iOS or Windows applications. Likewise, there was no need for independent development for each platform.

Partly thanks to Ionic, the percentage of programmers working exclusively with native development was reduced from 20% to 2.9%. What are the reasons behind this?

What is the Ionic Framework?

The main reason why Ionic is such a popular framework among mobile app developers is the large number of features it offers. Ionic developers work with more than 120 native features, such as fingerprint authorization, Bluetooth, Cordova add-ons, among others, which facilitates the creation of advanced applications.

The key features of the framework are:

1. It provides all the functionalities of the native mobile development SDK. So developers can create their own apps and customize them for any operating system.
2. Ionic brings a very powerful CLI, which allows you to create and test Ionic apps on any platform.
3. Provide elements and forms of interaction through Angular programmers.
4. It is based on SASS and therefore provides a load of UI components to create truly advanced and robust applications.

Why Ionic is the best option for the development of PWA?

Let's start with some statistics:

• Tinder reduced the load times from 11.91 seconds to 4.69 seconds. In addition, its new PWA is 90% smaller in size than the native Tinder app for Android.
• Facebook enjoyed a strong increase in its participation and download rates after expanding to PWA.
• The Uber PWA is very fast, even in a 2G network. The main app takes less than 3 seconds to load in 2G.
• The BookMyShow PWA takes less than 3 seconds to load. In addition, your PWA is 54 times smaller than your native Android application and 180 times smaller than your native iOS app.

Yes, you can see some important names here. All of them changed to PWA using Ionic Framework. There are also other names like Starbucks, Pinterest, Lyft, Twitter and Forbes that saw a significant increase in user participation with their progressive web applications.

Why should I use the Ionic Framework?

1. Ionic allows the mobile developer to use a combination of programming languages such as CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript. The unification of these three languages is powerful enough to create attractive and efficient interfaces.
2. It is very easy to change platform and OS.
3. Ionic is compatible with Angular, the most common framework used to create interactive mobile apps. In fact, the Angular API is the basis of Ionic.
4. The Cordova Plugins. For those who do not know them, Cordova is a suite of command line tools and an add-on bridge that helps developers create native apps by calling native code from Javascript, adding platforms. Because Ionic is an HTML5 framework, it takes a native partner like Cordova to guarantee its own functioning as a native app. This makes it easier for developers to access native functions such as camera, GPS, Bluetooth, etc.
5. Finally, Ionic brings a very powerful CLI, which provides developers with the functionalities of the native SDK, including an integrated development server and debugging tools.

Are there alternatives?

In effect, there are two alternatives for Ionic, such as React Native (a framework that allows the creation of hybrid mobile apps using JavaScript and React.js) and Xamarin (a framework compatible with Microsoft that uses C# and native libraries that are wrapped in the layer .NET).

Conclusion

In summary, progressive web applications have been firmly established among major brands and are running smoothly through the Ionic Framework. Undoubtedly, people like what they are receiving and the wave of Ionic is unstoppable.