First off, I LOVE Ionic. I’ve already migragted both of my apps from 1.x through all of the 2.0.0-beta.X and now I’ve migrated to 2.0.0-rc.2. I LOVE Ionic.
But one thing that has never made sense is that Ionic has blurred the lines between itself and Cordova. ionic build ios, for example executes the entire Ionic/Angular JS build stack and then runs cordova build ios under the hood to take the web app and make it an iOS app.
I think the decision to bundle these actions was made to make it seem easier for new users, but I feel like it is actually more confusing.
I see it as two tasks that are independent 1) “compiling JS” which gets you a perfectly functioning single page web application. 2) “building a native app with cordova” from that single page web app.
I would suggest making a clear distinction between these two. Right now, for example, I don’t have agood way to build a minified / uglified version of my single page web application (I guess I should run $ ionic build browser?.
We have discussed this a bit internally and agree that there needs to be a solution for this. Could you create an issue on the CLI repository?