First, I want to thank the Ionic team for their dedication with the platform’s development and improvement. The ionic 4 has been presented for quite a time and brought a lot of new cool things and stuff as always though I haven’t tried it myself to be honest. My question is, in the case that I choose to stay with Ionic 3 without upgrading (for both my old and future projects), would I still be able to use it without any obstacle just like they way it is as the current time? Especially with the rapid changes of Android and iOS and no support from the Ionic team since they have migrated to and focus on the new version.
My only concern would be that ionic v3 only supports up to Angular 5.x.x and typescript 2.x.x
Ionic 4 leverages Angular 7.1.x now and typescript 3.1.x
If I were to give advise I would say stick to Ionic 3! There’s just no support yet for Ionic 4 and most tutorials that exists out there are based on Ionic 3 or earlier.
I’ve implemented a full on app on Ionic 4 and things are just not working and you cannot get any help anywhere, not even on this very forum! Simple things such us two-way model data binding aka [(ngModel)], *ngIf, *ngFor worked on the browser but all failed when the app was installed on e.g. Android device! In simple words, Leave Ionic 4 until there’s good help out there because when you’re stuck then you’re stuck. With regards to the Ionic team, they should’ve not released Ionic 4 if it is not ready!
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There’s still lots of people on ionic 1 for their apps which are ‘supported’ but not developed.
The upgrade path between ionic 3 and ionic 4 doesn’t seem to be a massive leap so I might recommend going for ionic 3 for now and upgrading once ionic 4 is released for real.
I’ve been working on moving my project from Ionic 3 to 4 but only as PWA. So far I am happy with the results however for me the actual transfer from 3 to 4 was a lot of work and a big jump despite what people say. As mentioned above the biggest issue is the lack of support, you have to dive deep to find answers (or work them out yourself) and this is very time consuming. My concern is though even with the official release it’s going to take another 12 months for the community/blogs to catch up. You can be waiting a very long time. So if you are happy staying on ionic 3 and it meets your need stay. However if you are committed to the Ionic platform start learning it now but without the expectation of a commercial release at least then when it is official and bugs ironed out you will be ahead of everyone else. Just my 2 cents.
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