First of all I want to say I am a big fan of the work the Ionic team is doing. The support, quality of work and community is simply amazing. I say that cause having tried other frameworks in the recent month, whether it’s cross-platform native (Xamarin & Nativescript) or hybrid frameworks, the Ionic team is quite a bit ahead in terms of Documentation, Quality, Stability, Ease of Use and Developer Support.
My only wish is that one day, the Ionic team comes up with a cross-platform truly native components. Similar to Nativescript.
Is it wishful thinking or could there be something on the horizon after Ionic 2 ?
It wouldn’t make sense for Ionic offer “truly” native components, the whole methodology of the framework is that it runs on the web platform. Xamarin / NativeScript and Ionic are fundamentally different approaches, both with their advantages and disadvantages.
On the surface this would seem to be duplicating well-established efforts like React-Native.
However one interesting thing I read some time ago is that the Angular 2 architecture will allow different “renderers”.
This would mean that, if I understood correctly, you could completely replace the “webview renderer” with a “(react) native renderer” without changing your (Angular/Ionic) application code.
Writing the (react) native renderer for Ionic could even be a third-party effort i.e. not require effort from the Ionic team, because I think the priorities of the Ionic team will lie elsewhere (ionic.io services, Ionic Creator, PWA/Progressive Web Apps and so on).
Anyway all of this is not just theory, an “Angular 2 - React Native renderer” has already been built:
So in theory it should be possible to build an Ionic app and have it use native components, but as things stand now it will probably not be easy to do.
But who knows in the future, if people would be interested in building this.
Our goal with Ionic is to help you mix web and native controls easily and we will continue to add more native support to Ionic over time. One reason we aren’t going 100% “native controls” is that it limits our ability to let Ionic apps easily work on all the platforms people care about (mobile/PWA/electron/desktop). For example, now that the PWA future is upon us, Ionic is better positioned than pretty much any other mobile technology, and Ionic developers get to add PWA as a deployment target without really any changes required to their app (and this is something we’re focusing on hard in 2017).
Our #1 focus with Ionic is to make it very easy to build quality apps insanely quickly. We think the web stack is the best way to do this, and it’s improving constantly such that the performance gap is being closed rapidly and the web is becoming the best of all worlds.
Developers love Electron for desktop apps because desktop has gotten to the point where performance between a JS/web app and a desktop app don’t matter for 99% of apps, but the dramatic difference in speed of development and cross-platform reuse does. The Computer Scientist in me sees the same thing happening with mobile, so I’d rather invest in that future.
