I’d like to hear from those of you who have been testing ionic 2 for a while now: is it safe to start a big project using rc0?
I don’t want to start a project that is deprecated right away from scratch (ionic and angular 1), but it kind of scares me a little all these posts about rc0 issues.
Well, as it’s a forum, maybe it’s just natural that I can see nothing but a scary compilation of issues. So tell me about your experiences: is ionic 2 a safe bet already?
me too in a dilemma whether to use ionic 1.x or 2 to start a project that is being planned to go-live Apr’2017.
I don’t know if it helps, but we’re planning on releasing in a few months our first big app for a social network. I’ve had the same dilemma and yes you’ll probably bump into some problems but not as much as I had to go through the alpha, beta and RC0 versions 
Besides the RC0 indicates no more API changes which smooths your development.
To give you an idea our app is currently around 6000 lines of code.
If your project does not have a desktop version requirement, I’d suggest using Ionic 1 and specifically the Ionic Creator. It looks really easy to get up and running quickly and looks very stable. The weekly videos that @mattkremer puts out are really cool.
However, if your project needs to run in a desktop browser as well, Ionic 2 is the way to go. I’ve been prototyping in Ionic 2 / Angular 2 for months now, with a release plan of around a year from now. The upgrades from beta have been a HUGE pain, but the new stuff is a tremendous improvement. While there are still some missing features (a datepicker that defaults the selector to today) and development environment issues (slow dev builds), the code itself feels ready for prime time. 
Ionic 2 is extremely cutting-edge. There are absolutely some risks in using this right now. However, everything the Ionic team is doing is building my trust in their platform. I do wish they could do it a little bit faster, though. 
Just out of curiosity why would you make the tradeoff between Ionic1 / Ionic2 dependant on the whether you need a desktop version?
I personally would tell you to wait until the end of the year, although Ionic 2 is in RC.1, they made a huge change in the build process, they changed to Rollup, the issue is that Rollup has a lot of issues with many libraries that have to be sorted, or more like a lot of libs have issues with Rollup.
Anyway dealing with Rollup is a Pain in the But, also most tutorials are broken due to the change to Rollup so you’ll be mostly on your own using Ionic 2 in the current state.
Because Ionic 1 doesn’t do desktop.
Thanks everyone for your answers!
@luchillo17, that’s a good point you brought. I’ll take a closer look at the Rollup issues here in the forum.
I am building an enterprise hybrid app for aircraft maintenance for a major airline in US. I am using Ionic 2. Initiall stared with ionic 1 and then decided to use Ionic 2 Mainly I used ionic 2 because it was based on Angular 2. I like coding in typescript because I come from Java background and don’t like Java script that much.
Nice! And how is the development experience so far? Are things going smooth? Any major issues?
No major issues but upgrades to latest Ionic versions are not so smooth. Its takes couple of hours to get everything working after updating to latest ionic. Moving from beta 11 to RC0 was a pain and today I am going to update to rc1.
Because this forum and help from ionic team you get to solve most of the issues quickly.
You guys were really helpful. I’ve made my mind: I’ll go for ionic 2.
Don’t want to upgrade from 1 to 2 in near future, that woul be a real pain. If I start from rc1, it shouldn’t take so much effort to make next upgrades.