My experience getting pretty far building an Ionic app

Bootstrap for cross-platform mobile apps?

My project

I wanted to learn...

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My stack

The dream

A mobile app that...

  • Is available on iPhone and Android phones (not tablets)
  • Feels fast and native
  • Has almost all the features of the web app
  • Stores user credentials securely
  • Gets realtime updates with websockets
  • Receives push notifications

DEMO TIME

Nice parts

  • Code re-use between my web app and mobile app:
    • ~90% of services code
    • ~70% of controller code
    • No view code
  • It looked pretty native - especially form components
  • It's pretty fast
  • Websockets worked without much tweaking
  • Cordova side of push notifications wasn't hard
  • Icon & splash-screen generation was especially awesome

Rougher parts

  • Figuring out source control strategy for code that is 70-90% similar
  • Dealing with CORS when working locally - update today!
  • Setting up dev-environment specific settings
  • Debugging - especially device-specific functionality
  • Had to buy an iOS developer license - $99/yr
  • Ionic View app didn't give me what I need...
    • ...but I think it's a great idea and will get there
  • Hard to tell if Android app would look as native

Would I use Ionic again?

YES

and I think it's only going to get better

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