Hi All,
This is a ‘desperate’ call to reach the maintainers of ionic-native. Myself (and many many others) Have created issues in the repo, proposed solutions or PR but get no response at all.
Anyone else facing this issue? If there’s a maintainer out there: can we help out?
I created this issue to get attention to this subject:
please tell us if this repo should be considered abandoned. (maybe some of us could fork it and move on even)
@max FYI.
Ionic recently announced plans to hire someone to work on native plugins, so I doubt the repo is dead forever.
The last release was 15 days ago. The project is hardly dead, we’re just really busy and we’re it’s not possible for us to respond to issues all day every day. We work on ionic-native in sprints so once that next sprint happens, more issues and releases will happen.
i’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone, nor do I say the repo is dead, nor do I wan’t to imply that you guys don’t work very hard! Of course I understand you do not have time to respond to each issue every day. That would take to much time.
But I guess it would be possible to check out the issues every 2 months or so? That’s how long some issues go without a response, even though the community responds and acknowledges the issue.
We are all busy, but at this time raising issues in Ionic native feels like a waste of time.
Raising this questions was the only way to get a response, so i hope Ionic will focus but more onto this.
My issue got closed (rightly so, it;s not a true issue) but don’t let this get out of sight, you will lose valuable input from your users
How exactly does Ionic-native work? Plugins are developed by individuals / teams outside of Ionic, Ionic approves them for use, then someone at Ionic (or multiple people) work on maintaining them in tandem with those who created the plugin?
Is that accurate?
Cooperation by original plugin creator is not required, as Ionic Native “just” produces wrappers around them.
Rest is more or less correct.
Community and plugin users are required to make sure everything still works and is documented correctly (especially if the underlying Cordova plugin changes).
Thanks @Sujan12. Interesting dynamic there. I wonder if some sort of sliding-scale payment system based on usage and with a caveat that the plugin be maintained and issues be addressed by the creator in a timely fashion would be plausible?
Or would a payment system basically defeat the nature of the system?
Original poster didn’t mean the authors of the original Cordova plugins, but the maintainers of Ionic Native. Your proposed solution might work if there was a problem with the Cordova plugins themselves, but right now this just doesn’t apply.
Ah ok, I see that now. Thanks @Sujan12
I’m not as optimistic as you are, and I’d point to InAppPurchase as an example of a plugin that is fragile. That prompted me to suggest on the Ionic Native repo that driftyco might want to curate plugins that were critical to an app’s income. I offered to pay for this, very similar to what @jaydz just posted. So I bet there’s probably a market.
Oh, there clearly may be a market to solve this problem - it just was out of scope of this topic and everything posted here before 
Finding and using a working Cordova plugin can be like herding cats. Forks of forks of forks with different additions and changes. F-U-N!
@Sujan12 yeah, to be honest, my first (very gullible ) hope was that ionic-native would manage this. That’s clearly not the case. So then I thought: let’s help them out! Create a fork of faulty repo’s, do a PR and give the ionic-native maintainers a heads up to either use the fork for the time being, or choose another solution.
Sadly there is NO response whatsoever on issues. Every now and then some are picked up in their sprints, but why, how or when is a surprise
I keep stressing: ionic is loosing valuable input from the open source community this way.
PRs are triaged more often than issues, as these contain actionable data (new code) that can be decided on. Issues are one level away from actionability. If there are still useful PRs or other useful work, you don’t just jump in and spend 5 hours responding to (mostly not actionable => “useless”) issues.
Again:
If you actually want to help, feel free to go through the issues as well and help out. Not only on ones that you create, but also on the ~250 from other people. Help the users, tell them to close the issue if it actually isn’t relevant (any more) or correct. This will help a maintainer to actually have something to work with when they decide to spend some time on issues.
A well written response from a reputable user like you that actually describes the problem that has to taken action on, maybe already with some ideas about solutions etc. makes it much easier for them to tackle these with actual work, and not spending hours copy pasting “What is your ionic info output? What version are you using? What are you talking about? Can you build a repro project and upload it on Github?” responses.
(I write, after spending 3 hours responding to forum posts and issues of the projects I contribute to… instead of actual coding.)
you are completely right! I will try to put in some time this weekend.
But having said that, it is way more rewarding and appealing if there is at least some feedback from maintainers. Really a small: “hmm, that’s right, this could be an issue. We do not have a lot of time atm, but if you find more info that would help.” would make the repo feel much more alive, and more users will engage. At this point I do not have the impression that issues are taken seriously (as opposed to other ionic - repos btw!). Community effort is a 2-way street (or some other cheesy-sounding remark).
But enough on this topic: i will try to comment on some issues, hoping this will lead to maintainers to do the same.
I know what you mean, but from experience I can tell you that just reading and understanding the problems takes most of the time. Same here in the forum, noting down a reply is a thing of seconds - the time consuming part is finding out what people are talking about. (90% of times data is missing, so before you can actually decide “yeah, we should do something about this” you have to start the question game I mentined above) It a really difficult problem to solve. 1 hour coding is so much more “productive” than triaging issues - especially if your days are fully booked anyway.
2 posts were split to a new topic: I’m reviewing some of the ionic 3 component. I think they are not designed well,
Sometimes I wonder if this forum needs a faq
Then again, not sure if people would go through it. Some/most of them imho clearly lack inquisitive attitude and sufficient self reflection when figuring out their issues. Or trust in Google search tool
Btw @Sujan12 , your default copy/paste as answers to questions are the best. Has been a while though since u posted the best one: ionic pro is a closed environment…
Canned replies they are called here in Discourse
When I first looked at Ionic I thought it would be the Ionic team providing/maintaining the plugins and not just the wrappers, which I would have been happy to pay for, but seeing this mess kinda drags me away a little from Ionic, as I’d end up implementing the native code myself anyways, given that I’d definitely not rely on 5th party providers that do not properly maintain, let alone test their code.
There’s so much sloppy, untested, horribly bad (or not at all) documented code there, it’s borderline irresponsible to use these plugins 
Are there any plans for Ionic to come up with their own native, properly supported plugins?
That’s exactly the direction things are moving. The goal is to not need Cordova at all.