

Mastering the Ionic Framework: Build and Deploy Native-Speed Angular Apps - ericmsimons
https://thinkster.io/ionic-framework-tutorial/

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aikah
Native-Speed my a __. Sorry but people should stop lying about it. Angular is
great but it 's damn slow no matter what people say about it. And Webapps UIs
are never as fast as native UI on mobile. Once these 2 things have been
debunked,we can talk honestly about the advantages of using things like Ionic
or other solutions.

I personnally look forward to using React Native ,as a Titatinium user, there
is no question using native components directly instead of html+CSS in
webviews is better, faster and when the UI kit of my mobile is updated , I
don't have to restyle all the components to match the current design. If I
need a webview,well I have access to the webview anyway.But all the app
SHOULDN'T live inside a webview.

~~~
ericmsimons
Author of the course here: to users, the performance difference is not
noticeable. If you look under the hood, sure, there are absolutely
inefficiencies that happen. But a vast majority of the time it has no effect
on the user experience, and that has been the dealbreaker with hybrid apps in
the past. Browser rendering is now fast enough, and the frontend technologies
robust enough, that developing and deploying hybrid apps can often be a much
better experience than developing in native.

That said, React native looks awesome and I'm looking forward to using it -
but it != death of Ionic/hybrid apps imho.

~~~
clarle
To users on high-end devices (latest iPhones, high-end Androids), the
performance difference is extremely minimal.

The second you go down to the low-end and mid-end devices, it's very obvious
that a hybrid app has performance issues.

~~~
ericmsimons
When we built Songhop (an Ionic powered app) and tested on 4S, the app
performance was the same as other apps on the phone. Unless the phone isn't
updated to the latest OS version, performance in webview will generally be
similar to native apps.

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rajington
Surprised no one has mentioned
[http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/](http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/)
It's basically Ionic with at least SOME of the native speed gripes other
comments are complaining about.

I agree that it's not going to meet native but in most cases it's _good
enough_ and you are getting both platforms for free. If you can build for both
platforms and don't mind learning native stuff then more power to you, but
Ionic definitely has it's place. Until I see React Canvas reaching the
maturity of Ionic, it'll have its place. I also hope Ionic works on mobile
browsers as long as possible, because not many other mobile web frameworks
match it.

~~~
register
The problem with such a framework is that the native part is completely
blackboxed. I would never consider to adopt an hybrid framework that does not
provide access to code because of the concern that some corner cases, which I
cannot anticipate, could not be covered properly. I wrote a board game
application in which I mix 2d graphics with native UI views. In the end I
chose C++ for the business logic + 2d part ( with cocos2d-x) and Java or
Objective-c for the GUI part. While It has been sometimes awkward ( especially
on Android ) I feel to have done the right choice at the time I started. I
have been able to reause a lot of code and the tools and languages I have
chosen are fully supported. If I had to start again today I probably would
consider Xamarin ( at the time it was too much expensive ) or something like
RemObjects Silver.

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sebringj
come the f-- on. ionic is using css transforms on a good day. At least famo.us
is trying harder and react.js is going native. I'm still on the fence if the
extra effort is worth it but have been dabbling in java and objective c/swift.
Worst case, I'll have a lot more to offer than just being a JavaScripter even
if its damn hard.

~~~
ericmsimons
I think the other comment thread on this post
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9070906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9070906))
addresses your points here. Not that you're wrong, but just that the
experience for the user is identical in most cases.

~~~
sebringj
If you are only doing a-z sure. Its native speed just sitting there too. But
doing anything interesting is going to take some chops. You could write a
native plugin for phonegap twice, true dat and you're still in js mostly but
you still had to do something custom to really get something worth doing that
stands out if you are needing to integrate with native functionality.

~~~
ericmsimons
Definitely, if you're building something with complex UI requirements (aka
"interesting" :) hybrid apps probably aren't the right choice. However, most
apps typically don't fall into that category - so if you know
angular/frontend, there's now virtually no incentive to go native (again,
unless you're making a complex UI).

~~~
sebringj
absolutely agree on that one, I'm still learning ios/android native anyway,
already have famo.us down pretty decently, going to try the create plugin
route because i feel the gains on UI are surpassing doing it all native for
both but just doing famo.us vanilla rather than angular because not convinced
perf is great on that

