When you take a look at the vids, the service offered around the framework itself looks absolutely awesome. Like, they covered it all.
They claim to improve performances a lot and reduce fragmentation thanks to their wrapper : http://www.appgyver.com/wrapper
They offer emulators for iOS and Android with remote debugging tools even in Android 4.x, not forced from 4.4 !
Plugins of Cordova are integrated and maintained directly by their team.
Apparently there is much more. As someone who starts a project for my company, I was going to use Ionic, but since I read that I donāt know what to think. Something that comes back a lot in meetings is the performance question. If they provide really better performance, it could worth a shotā¦ But Ionic is loved and has a great community support behind it, so my heart donāt want to change.
What do you think about all this topic ? Do you know any other tools that dramatically increase performance, or gives a same ease for testing ? I would love input from Ionic creators also
I guess one of the downsides is that appgyver is blackboxed. You cannot build your apps outside of the cloud. For a lot of companies, sending your sourcecode to some cloud server is risky. Why is it free? What do they gain from it?
What do they do with your sourcecode?
Another issue is that of vendor lock. Since you depend completely on their service.
What if halfway through your development process they decide to cancel the services?
This is why I chose to locally develop the app for the company that I work for, using ionic.
Actually those are reasons I thought of myself (except from what do they gain for it - they have paid plans). And what do you do about the famous performances issues regular Cordova apps are said to encounter ?
I was always a fan of Steroids but itās unfortunate they are taking such a negative tone to their Ionic āfork.ā Interestingly enough, the fork is already outdated
At any rate, competition is good and you can expect Ionic to have much better Android support via Chromium soon. Ionic has live reload and remote debugging available already for Android 4.x and iOS so youāre good there. Our plugin library ngCordova has a large community behind it, with over 50 plugins and 240 PRs submitted by 50 contributors around the world, so you benefit from a large user base of developers instead of us trying to do it all ourselves.
We are going to go full steam ahead with making the web platform a 1st class citizen for hybrid apps, rather than having areas where native development is required and areas where web development is required. That is not how desktop web apps are built and we donāt think itās the way mobile apps should be built.
At any rate, youāll find a much larger community of developers with Ionic and we are investing heavily in making Ionic the best option for mobile development around, and in many ways we think it already is.
Your message is absolutely awesome, and right on so many levels Iām glad, because I really love Ionic project so I just wanted explanations, I guess !
What @max says is so true, competition is always a good thing.
I think one of the biggest strengths that Ionic boasts is their community interaction. The fact that you can send a guy like @max or @adam a message and have them respond is awesome.
The Ionic team has always been very focused on empowering their community and itās been tremendously successful, canāt wait to see what the future holds for Ionic!
I agree @max pretty cheeky of Appgyver to fork ionic then talk of how to improve its performance issues.
I could never quite get onboard with Steriods as they have treated Android as such a second class citizen for so long - for instance the steriods community have been screaming for a native android ādrawerā for over a year now and they always answered it was more important to stabilise the ios version first - so you couldnāt write the same code for both platforms. I believe they have now used ionic to bridge some of these gaps. That said some of their tools are pretty terrific.
I feel they will struggle to keep up with the fast pace of chance in the ionic sdk.
Where they currently have an advantage is there app management and deployment/scanner and build systems. Also that they are free.
I know ionic platform will deliver these functions and be done to the standard we all enjoy from ionic. The pricing will be the interesting part I guess.
Telerik also offer these services (and charge for them) and support ionic/angular in there platform even though Kendo is their native tongue if you like. They do it in a more elegant way than appgyver and truely promote ionic as an equal choice.
Iām sticking firmly with you guys and look forward to the year ahead.
cheers
Darren
We were working on a very large app built with Ionic in the pass few months and just released a first beta, seeing AppGyver release with their promising agenda made us think if we made a good decision (Must agree - todayās android performance is quite bad) - But after reading your comment I feel much more confident riding with Ionic as itās evolving.
Just one request for your amazing future plans and your tons of new releases - make the migration from version to version easy for existing applications built on older versions.
Iām building for android, and testing my app in my Tablet (Galaxy TAB 2) and I donāt have seen performance problemsā¦
In the end of the year I believe Iāll publish my app, now Iām worried about performanceā¦ what kind of problems have you faced?
@max, Iāve started using Ionic 1 year ago.
I was working on a app for a client of mine but I had to stop cause the framework was changing at every release.
My client does not want beta software to go into production.
The poor documentation (at that time) didnāt allow me to convert to the new release easily.
I know thereās always a forum but going through all the posts was becoming time consuming.
Now I am waiting for a stable release (not a beta) but Iāve been waiting for a few months now.
I know youāre working hard and I appreciate your efforts but now I am wondering if I made the right choice or I should just choose another framework and come back to Ionic in 1 year time while things have settled.
The fact is, if you want to work with hybrid platform, there is not really much choice - I mean relevant ones, of course you can go and start with Jquery Mobile if you absolutely wish so ^^
And as far as I can tell, almost every other choice is irrelevant at some point. Appgyver is impressive, yes - but donāt forget their SuperSonic is an Ionic framework, and not even of the last version. Beside, their tools are looking great on the demos, but a lot of people complain about how buggy it is - so they may be a good choice, but in the future, not now. Telerik looks more stable, you could look into it. After that, the only one that has great feedback, and I must say Iām not comfortable with it - I want to work with Angular on a mobile app, not a proprietary language.
Famo.us looks great, but is really too young for now. It will be a good choice in the future also, if they keep going on the same way.
Do you have some other accurate software in mind ?
There are lot of options out there. I havenāt explored them all but I guess there are a few alternatives.
Luckily for me my client is in a stand-by state so I can wait a little bit longer.
I guess next year (few months time) they will need a beta release. At that stage Iāll have to decide if I want to stick with ionic of switch to some more mature framework.
I have been messing around with Supersonic for a couple of hours now and I am very impressed. As far as I can tell they are going native on a lot of the ui components and opening up separate webviews for content. They also have set up angular in a modular way, meaning multi page app. I am not sure what they have copied from Ionic other than CSS. Their build tools are pretty nice, a QR code scanning AppGyver app to test your apps, build for iOS and Android with the ability to add third party Cordova plugins, etc. I was not aware that they want to lock you in to their backend, thatās no good.
I have been trying to decide which cross platform mobile framework to go with. I have looked at Ionic, Supersonic, Xamarin and Appcelerator Titanium Alloy. Xamarin looks nice, but I have no stomach for Microsoft, they are off the list. So I am down to Ionic, Supersonic or Appcelerator.
Things are moving so fast in this sector. Every time you turn around, some startup is coming out with something that looks better. In a couple of years there will be clear leaders and frameworks that have failed. So how do you make a decision now ?
I know your feel. In your list, you forgot about Famo.us also, and Telerikās Appbuilder. Yes, there will be a clear choice in the coming months / years and leaders will appears. That why I stick with Ionic : the COMMUNITY makes the choice, and as of now, they have the nicest, most involved, brightestā¦ And largest community in that sector. So well, there is a good chance they will eventually hit the top. And all the arguments given above are also right.
I use Telerik AppBuilder for its build process and ship ionic code up to appbuilder to take the code to the finish line and publish it.
I did use the Kendo stuff with AppBuilder for a while and it is very good too.
In my mind there is no doubt Ionic is the right choice - I have a couple of production apps in both app stores and they have been there for months now with no troubles. One has around 700 users and I havent had negative comments re performance with Android (though I do know it is not great).
I know the ionic team will deliver an āAppBuilderā like build platform and I will probably switch then (depending on functions and price)
I did use AppGyver for a few months months ago and didnāt like the buggy nature of it and the upgrades were not smooth. May have got better now but Iām not prepared to use supersonic when I can use the latest ionic here.
For what itās worth, 28 bug issues reported on Git for AppGyver Steroids since Nov 8. Thatās getting close to a bug a day. I think I will steer clear
Iām currently building a Ionic app (started 6 months ago) and I can assert that the problem of performance, in 98% of cases, comes from really bad Angular/Javascript programmers.
Iāve seen some friends creating their own Ionic appā¦and Batarang killing itself when he discovers about 10 watchers in each controller, associated with services/factories that ādonāt stopā keeping every data, as being singletons.
They argued: āwowww itās slow !! Itās not a very powerful frameworkā¦letās open a tuto about Objective-C/Swift ā¦ā
=> ridiculous
Today, using the latest Beta 14, I can ensure that on Android and iOS, an app could be REALLY great and as performant as native ones.
For Android, when the Js Scrolling is removed (expected), the whole should really be great, but itās by far very very acceptable for now.
Yes Ionic is still on beta on thatās why thereāre still some bugs.
But if you follow this forum, read the ionic.bundle.js (the part that concerned you to figure out how Ionic works on specific part), you will improve your app and even notice that your potential ābugsā will be fixed in less than a couple of days by the community!
I guess, it is a battle between proprietary software vs open source one. With an open source one you have a large contributing community which can produce a large number of plugins.
Considering the fact SuperSonic (and AppGyver) are at the early stages in their lives and very buggy, it will take a while before I will even consider SuperSonic to be a part of a production project.
I like the idea of separating different tabs. However, it is only a part of the story. The biggest problem so far Iāve seen, even with native apps, is long lists/tables with images. For example, in iOS I had to use a low level graphics library to create a really fast list. Tabs, on the other hand, are not the bottleneck.
Besides, once Apple has appearance breaking changes again, the developers will have to involve graphic designers to help changing their skin like they did after the iOS7 changes.
I like Telerikās approach where complex charting controls went native, while they kept the pure HTML5/CSS/JavaScript approach for the rest of the app.
