Call to ionic native maintainers

Well that’s an interesting direction, but it sounds more like a looooooong term goal, right?

From what I hear more “months” than “years”.

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Read the most recent official Ionic blog post.

You are referring to Help Test Ionic Native 5 - Ionic Blog, right?

That reads a tad different than what I interpreted into your message. ngCordova is being dropped, and that “many more maintained plugins” note, not really sure what exactly that is referring to, maybe making more plugins accessible? Not sure, but looking in the v5 branch things are still the same with regards to community plugins.

To me this reads as if things are just getting decoupled from the Ionic framework, so that potentially any JavaScript framework can used. That sounds nice, and I’m looking forward to it, but it doesn’t really seem to be related to my question/concerns, except for that it’s giving me the impression that the community maintained plugin strategy is being continued :thinking:

I believe Ionic “avocado” is what you’re being guided toward.

I sure hope that becomes real! But I was trying to be more cautious. I read the Native 5 blog post as being able to unplug from frameworks on both sides – from Angular and Cordova. If you decide a Cordova plugin is the best tool for the job, you can use it. But for example the Cordova audio plugin is sunsetting because of the rise of the Web Audio API. I think there’s going to be a general move away from native, toward “web components,” interpreted generally.

Yeah, the avocado concept would be an amazing thing to see come to fruition. I agree that the landscape that is cordova plugins is a rocky one. I don’t run into a whole lot of problems, but I also don’t use a whole lot of plugins either.

Out of curiosity, does any semblance of a monetized and regulated pool of cordova plugins exist? Or is the market for plugins entirely run on donations?

Eddy Verbruggen has one or two. And AdMobPro takes a percentage of the profits. So there are some plugins, including with Native shims, that aren’t donation-based.

That’s exactly the direction things are moving. The goal is to not need Cordova at all.

Yes,

Save useful cordova plugins and abandon Cordova which is full of bugs!
I tried React Native with Genymotion and found genymotion’s android emulator is as fast as Ionic’s browser lab. It updates in real time… and takes only few seconds to see updates on native android emulator. If Ionic projects must rely on cordova which is inferior, it’s going to be behind games. React Native is surprisingly similar to Angular besides different syntax for its XML

I talked to a few of guys who created public domain native cordova plugins (native audio, media)… one of them was a product specialist at IBM. I think some of cordova plugins are worth saving if Ionic team can manage them well. Ionic team should transfer those plugins which they can’t make better on avocado.

One or two, plus a couple others. Pretty small percentage. I guess I don’t see how the future of app development could possibly include cordova plugins, that being the case. One could argue that the community can contribute to maintenance, but that seems unrealistic. Diffusion of responsibility, especially when the developers themselves can’t be held responsible for the most part all but ensures failure.

Too bad, as these plugin developers obviously pour a ton of work into them.

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I agree with all of this. In fact, I’ve come to the same conclusions before, in different words. So I bet other people have too, way before either of us. But I think Cordova is going to go the way of Crosswalk. Once there are enough universal browser APIs, native programming will be pointless unless you need graphics speed, in which case hybrid programming isn’t the tool of choice anyway.

Obviously we’re not breaking any news here, just talking over the inevitable. With what @AaronSterling has posted / linked, and avocado being an ionic concept that is also trending away from cordova plugins, Ionic is fully aware that it’s an unsustainable model.

But yes, Ionic taking over responsibility for some core plugins that add key functionality to their product is pretty reasonable, and realistic.

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Exact sentiments here. An interesting thought is the ramifications for native programmers. I.e., Android devs have a huge benefit in that Java is an in demand language outside of the mobile platform. SWIFT, not so much.

Back in time, android hardware emulators were so slow. It took 2+ hours to see update on laptop.
But I found that’s not the case anymore. I wonder why people would continue using cordova when React Native can solve problems just as fast as cordova and it will not come with splash screen bugs. Try Genymotion with React Native if you can’t believe.

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I’ve considered delving into React Native. I haven’t necessarily had the time or motivation to put a whole lot into it though. I tried once, ran into some issues with node versioning and gave up. I might give it another go out of curiosity.

I say give it one full day to understand React Native. It has very similar concept to Angular 5… but I found it’s programmed better.
It doesn’t use HTML but if you learn how its markup language works, you’ll be able to use them just like HTML & CSS3 combo. It’s literally html with different tag names such as View, TextView, etc but they’re div on html. and Facebook guys did a good job implementing CSS3 to native app. They converted everything pretty well so it doesn’t feel like using something different.

and React Native’s maintainers are facebook… I know it’ll be here for a long time.

Just like Parse was :wink:

(I’m just “making the jokes”, and don’t actually think that React will disappear soon)

lol
Yeah Parse shut down last year…

React Native works pretty fine without permanent bug for now and it has around 8,700 NPM packages you can use. I find it to be a good solution for some apps I’ll be building.

Eventually the best solution is learning Java & XML & Android Studio but I’m not a huge fan of UI design process on android studio yet. I know Java will never die.

Yeah, the UI design process with Studio can be pretty mind-numbing. Native development in general can be, just in terms of the number of lines of code that need to be written to accomplish anything. It can be so tedious