Ionic 4 - Why?

What the reasons that will make me to upgrade my app from ionic 3 to ionic 4?
As i checked there is few changes that i can’t accept for them.
So i really want to know what ionic 4 give me that i will say " I have this!!! ".
Thanks.

I would say, summarized

  • based on web components = lighter app = possibly a faster boot time of your app
  • better routing for pwa
  • v4 = LTS support
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One big one would be if you have other dependent libraries that require Angular 6+.

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Heck, you want to use VueJS or React? or go framework less? Then go ionic 4 XD

Want to build a real PWA with acceptable binary size and performance? Ionic 4 :slight_smile:

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Angular 6 would be a more logical choice - surely Ionic is mobile not desktop.

Why is a PWA desktop focused? And Ionic v4 uses Angular 6…

But yes, if you want to have a desktop focused/only UI you might be better off not using Ionic for UI at all.

I disagree. We have used ionic for some desktop-only apps, works great. :wink:

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I think it is more a case that Ionic is mobile focused - the layout of lists and so on are designed to look good on a small screen.

Like you I also use Ionic for desktop only apps - but solely because it saves having to learn another framework. Playing around with version 4 it became very clear that it is really Angular 6 with added features for Android and IOS.

10 posts were split to a new topic: Ionic 4 and LTS?

It was never that advertised, but Ionic always was “just” Angular plus some UI and some code :wink: But yes, Ionic 4 makes this much more prominent and straight forward - which is a good thing in my opinion. Less Ionic specific plumbing is a good thing.

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First of all, Ionic 4 is still in beta, so you shouldn’t upgrade unless you want to help test a beta :smiley:

Second of all, there are a number of reasons to upgrade. First is to stay current with official Ionic tools/conventions/etc. The other is to follow Angular conventions which will make it easier to use Angular tooling and hire Angular devs.

Beyond that, there are more components, the components are higher quality, and they will be maintained more aggressively. Additionally, performance should be higher given that the amount of code bundled in the app is smaller (among other reasons, such as using web components).

I actually love that you asked this question, because it indicates to me that we’re hitting the mark with v4. It shouldn’t feel like a drastic upgrade! The change is significant for us at Ionic and with our broader strategy, but for Angular users, it should be pretty small. That was our goal!

Hope that helps.

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Nice comment but I fear like most - I am an Ionic developer and never touch Angular - so the changes are more difficult to get my head around,

I would suggest you hold your horses before migrating your large projects.
First of all, Ionic 4 documentation is far from ready and won’t be fully ready anytime soon. To get clearer information about changes, you should visit https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic/blob/master/angular/BREAKING.md#action-sheet and then map it with other pages on the ionic website.

Second of all, customization such as custom icons is something Ionic documentations never enlightens enough about. Today ionicon is fully svg. No more fonts. To add a custom icon i must add it to ion-icon src attribute. What about tabs, does it have a src attribute as well?

I also think passing a url is lame. Why not have a media to add custom icons and then pass the name just like every other icons. Or create a generator just like resources to handle that.

Finally: Your stylings may fail especially those targeting sub-elements which is now shadowed. Styling a shadow element isn’t possible thus far. Until a proper documentation is released, you may have to rewrite alot of your css.

It took me awhile to figure out a solution with ionic 3 without a single character of documentation. Trust me, its not yet a simple migration especially if you already have a large app.

As for, I’m not migrating just yet. I’ll wait until all the odds add up

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Custom icons problem, see this issue: https://github.com/ionic-team/stencil/issues/998

Trust me you touched Angular more than you think. I’ve been active developing an app use the beta and aside from routing and some small stuff I haven’t been struggling at all with ionic 4.

My main problems are Angular related when going from 5 to 6 because small things like the angular/http class change slightly. But in the end I could just use fetch, axios or XMLHttpRequest