Don’t take this the wrong way - I think Ionic is just great and this forum is very helpful in helping developers to use Ionic and my real concern is that the owners of Ionic - Drifty - need to keep the goodwill with Ionic users - it reminds of when Microsoft had a great package called Silverlight but it just assumed it could force it users to change to a new framework.
The number of posts to this forum seems to be getting fewer by the day and I would suggest that the problem is Ionic 4 - why would anyone want to develop in Ionic 3 when it will be obsolete as soon as Ionic 4 goes live.
Plus the current development with Ionic 3 seems to be none existent - can’t remember the last time when running Ionic Serve it asked if I wanted to update to the latest version.
But here comes the bigger problem - I have even seen posts on the web about Ionic 5 - so why upgrade to Ionic 4 just wait for 5 to go live and miss all the development issues?
The policy of constantly reinventing the framework is hurting Ionic it should identify a market and aim to provide a framework which meets that need rather than keep changing what it does.
Well it probably wont die because of the one and only reason: no other Framework combines Web with Native Android/iOS and even Windows Phone so easily. As the perspective of a company this is still one of the best/fastest and cheapest solutions for Hybrid Apps.
I understand that its annoying to update every and every time again. But at the other Hand im glad it gets updated again and again. Ionic have to keep up with other Frameworks. Other Frameworks are doing this the same as Ionic does.
I wouldnt say the updates and so on drive Beginners to other Frameworks. I would say the lack of good Documentation does. There are many outdated or incomplete Docs online of Ionic. In example Android Permissions https://ionicframework.com/docs/native/android-permissions/ . They explain one way how to use it. But dont even provide a list of permissions and so on. You would say “Look at the Android Docs and find out which Permissions are available” but Newbies dont know that. Just look on Stackoverflow how many Questions are about Ionic which arent described in the Docs but should. So it must be very frustrating for beginners if people cant help them and then even the docs cant help them too.
If the Docs and Tutorials getting updated -> More Users who have good experience -> More Help in Forums -> More Tutorials in Web. The community gets bigger.
I know many wont agree with me but thats what I think is one of the biggest problems of Ionic.
It was the great documentation that came with version 2 that get me interested in Ionic in the first place. Personally I still think the documentation is good - but then again I accept that the documentation is never going to keep in line with moving targets -i.e. Ionic and Cordova. As long as there is a working example I can look at it and work out how it does it.
Is it a public holiday today? - I expected a lot of negative replies to this post and was in two minds about posting it in the first place.
Well, if I’m not wrong, most of the work to update from 3 to 4 gonna be a “search and replace text work” so hopefully not too much work to migrate. Maybe they should make that more clear to don’t let people be afraid…
The community, the Ionic users, asked for this. We were all complaining about boot time and they are trying to improve performance by modifying the core. Personaly I’m really looking forward to that.
Ionic Native 5 != Ionic 5. Ionic Native 5 is now available.
Some of the most popular apps in the world are written with Ionic. And once Ionic 4 is live, people won’t need to learn Angular, which at least from my view from this forum, is the biggest hurdle for beginners. Very few posts are about Ionic itself. Most are about (1) Angular, or (2) plugin behavior on a real device.
Your post is very confusing since you’re making 2 contradictory arguments.
You say that ionic is dying since you haven’t seen it get updated in a long time
You say that it’s moving too fast since Ionic 4 is going live and then after that will be Ionic 5
Is it not being updated or is it moving too fast?
But in all seriousness, the Ionic team is following a published update cycle with ~1 year MAJOR version changes. There’s not a big difference between Ionic 3 and Ionic 4, but it may contain a few breaking changes since it is a MAJOR version change, not a minor one. This allows the Ionic dev team to make some more dramatic changes than they are able to with minor changes.
Angular gets major version updates every 6 months and they’re chugging along just fine. Your problem is that you are thinking of version numbering as incompatible framework changes, when the reality is that they’re just iterative changes where a major number means you might have to change some of your code, and that’s only happening once or twice a year, so it’s fairly easy to keep your older apps updated.