Ionic App without Cordova

Hi, I work for a large corporation and will be building some internal apps for employee productivity. I’ve been looking at Ionic and it’s awesome, but our lead architect isn’t a real fan of the hybrid apps built with html, javascript and ccs. We have embraced Angular JS, however, and I was thinking that if I were able to build it using Angular and used Ionic, it might be easier to sell. My question - is it possible to create an app using ionic that could also run outside of cordova as a non-native web app? In other words, could it run on a desktop or mobile device as a normal web app.

Thanks!
Mike

Ionic runs just fine in a desktop browser. I’d go so far as to say that most everyone using Ionic is developing in the browser and then pushing to the device for testing. Ionic apps look great in the browser.

However … Ionic really is geared towards mobile devices. You get a lot of overhead to support touch and animations that are expected on mobile devices. If y’all never intend to use these applications as “apps”, I’m not so sure I’d go that route. There are a lot of other frameworks for “enterprise” applications. For desktop sized apps, you could use tabs (like real tabs - not tab bars) that are incredibly useful for compartmentalizing views when screenspace is not so limited.

In the end, it all boils down to your needs. If you need some mobile apps (whether just “web apps” or actual installable apps), Ionic could be great. If your business applications aren’t too dependent on modern desktop app views, then Ionic could still be a good fit. If you feel that eventually you will port these apps to mobile, then starting with Ionic could work well. There are a lot of things to weigh and balance all the tradeoffs.

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Hi Maymard, can you please share your experiences using Ionic as a ‘normal’ web app? Keen to learn how you moved forward :smile:

As long as you do not intent to use any cordova plugins, it will run. As @Calendee wrote using it on a desktop does not make much sense, though. Running it within the browser of a mobile device is fine.