Just a few suggestions to market ionic an even bigger success

ionic-v1
1

I absolutely positively love everything ionic stands for and would love to see it become mega successful. I followed another mobile framework, Codenameone not long ago, and while I loved the concept, it never quite took off.

Right now ionic is very close to where Kendo Mobile is in term of Google Trends. I personally believe Angular alone is far superior than Kendo Mobile but there are a few things they are simply doing much better and none of it is that difficult to implement.

  1. Super fast sample apps, I have included the two sample apps compiled from getting started tutorials.

Ionic: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59760841/Ionic%20Starter%20App.apk 9MB
Kendo Mobile: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59760841/Kendo%20Mobile%20Starter%20App.apk 900KB (1.6MB unpacked on device)

If you only judge by the two sample apps, Kendo Mobile feel significantly faster on my Snapdragon 600 Android 4.1 device. When I tap as fast as I can between the tabs everything load almost instantly on Kendo sample, where the ionic sample app clearly lags. It wasn’t until I used Diego’s amazing ionic generator, things felt a bit more even but even then I feel Ionic/Angular is lagging behind a bit. Maybe Kendo implemented fastclick/caching but their app simply feels more “native”.

Whatever performance tweaks you have up your sleeves, I really feel it is extremely important to bake into the default build. First impression is everything!

  1. Visual effects and features, I really don’t feel the current starter app does ionic justice! Someone with a bit of design and taste can probably cook up a really attractive starter app showing off some more features of the framework. Add a good looking coat of CSS. The app doesn’t need to do much, it just needs to look good. Kendo really nailed this, Sencha is also very good at it and they are probably the most successful commercial Cordova/Phonegap variants today.

  2. While I love the open source nature of ionic, I strongly believe a product needs to generate revenue to improve. I am sure this is already on your road map with your past experience, but Kendo’s cloud service and online build is at this moment the best of any mobile framework. From creating an account to creating hello world to downloading apk, it took me five minutes. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, their emulator is also an amazing supplement to real Android emulators.

Just my two cents and I really hope you guys will be successful!

2 Likes
2

Hey @hitmantb, thanks so much for the great feedback, these are all awesome points.

The tap thing specifically is an intentional delay through our fastclick system to avoid nasty ghost clicks and other issues on mobile browsers, but we can and should improve this, and I made a note for us to look more closely at it: https://github.com/driftyco/ionic/issues/923

I’m not sure why the file size would be so different, maybe we are bundling in some unnecessary stuff without realizing it.

And yea, we made a change with the starter app to make it more “bare” to make it easier to customize, but that also made it more boring. We will re-evaluate that this week!

And stay tuned for #3 :smile:

Thanks!

3

can we just remove angular and angular-ui folder?

4

Yep, you can get rid of those. Maybe we need to add a release to gulp to just bundle everything up right before generating the app.

5

I understand completely on the design choice of ghost clicks. Thanks for opening the issue so incredibly fast, this is exactly what makes you guys so great!

It is just as it stands today, if you know nothing about the two frameworks, you ask your developer to download them and try them, if they end up with the apks above and try them out, they probably think “Kendo Mobile is faster than ionic” which is not true at all. I am telling everyone how much I enjoy using Angular and how well it works with ionic, I really think it makes jquery/kendo feel old in comparison!

Hopefully with cloud service and real revenue generation, this will be codiqa 2.0. I have no doubt with the experience you have you will roll out a great cloud model to make it as dumbed down as possible for those of us who are business/developer hybrids, or just want to log on from a random computer and put in some code :smile:

6

I have a feeling the extra size is the /www/res/screens/ folder that Cordova has for some reason.

When you build it will bundle the splash screens of every single platform into your project (and hilariously enough isn’t even where splash screens are sourced from).