At the prompt of @Sujan12, I’ll post a reply slightly more in depth than the one I deleted.
One of the things I’ve tried to reinforce with my team is you never disconnect responsibility from accountability. Currently, the Ionic team is attempting to take responsibility of the plugins by offering them as solutions, yet not take accountability for the plugins and play somewhat of a “blame game” by deferring issues to the plugin when issues arise.
In the end, the Ionic team is accountable for the success of all cordova plugins they integrate with because their customers (developers) can and should hold them accountable for the plugins they suggest to install.
Until their team takes accountability for these plugin’s success, they will have varied loyalty from their customers and varied adoption rate.
One of the things I’ve stumbled upon is the lack of documentation on the dependency matrix. There’s at least 4 simultaneous dependencies I’m aware of, there are probably more I’m unaware of:
- Cordova Version
- Cordova-[Android|IOS] Version
- Cordova Plugin Version
- Ionic Npm Package Version
I found out these details via discovery because the Ionic team doesn’t offer any of this absolutely required information on their plugin pages.
IMO, the Ionic Team should be taking on builds and testing the plugins they suggest to run. The plugins are open source, they can either do PRs or they can roll them into their own registry with fixes. Until then, they can’t really offer a stable product themselves.
If I were king of Ionic, I’d be running my own NPM registry. Testing and syncing successfully tested plugin builds (by them) into the registry. Have the ionic CLI point to their registry of known-good builds. Package the happy-path versions together as a package in order to synchronize versions to ensure the highest quality, which should be documented on the plugin pages as well. I would additionally ensure plugin integration between plugins so that you don’t end up with mutually exclusive plugins.
I can tell you, I’m definitely evaluating alternatives based on my limited experiences so far, as has been suggested on this thread. Which is sad, because the effort to make this product('s quality) excellent doesn’t seem so large as to warrant not doing it.