Hey guys, AppGyver developer pitching in! Great to hear feedback, and as Max said, competition is good – although I don’t believe it’s a 100% one-wins-the-other-loses game here. 
I agree that our “Ionic fork” message is not as clear as it could be – so to clear things up, we’re leveraging Ionic’s great CSS defaults, but doing navigation, tabs, side menus, header bars etc. via native UI. (Android now also has native drawer, so we’re not bridging that gap with Ionic.) So, the AngularJS directives, navigation, <ion-view> etc. are not part of Supersonic.
As for the reasons behind our design – the native UI performance is just so much better, especially on lower-end Android devices. It’s also a very fundamental shift in app making philosophy – do you create a “multi-page app” (which is how native mobile apps are structured) or run an SPA inside a single WebView (which is how modern web apps are structured)? Our bet is on the multi-page app structure, but we’ll see how things pan out.
To address some of the questions and concerns:
Local build support is coming up next year, but in the meantime, you can rest assured that we won’t do anything crazy with your code in our cloud build service. That would be just shooting ourselves in the leg. Essentially, we offer PhoneGap Build for free with support for any custom plugin, instead of just the whitelisted ones. This means you can also use ngCordova with Supersonic.
Great native lists are something that we’ll hopefully tackle soon also.
As for the Ionic fork being outdated – we’ll definitely catch up with the upstream ASAP. Since the fork only consists of the CSS parts, the changes we’re missing are not major, but that’s making excuses. Thanks for calling us out on that!
Re: @warish’s comment, Ionic has plenty of open bugs in their issue tracker also, but I feel that’s primarily a sign of a vibrant community – neither Supersonic/Steroids or Ionic is a completely finalized product by any means, so bugs are bound to exist. The fact that people are finding them and reporting them is a good thing, as it gives the developers a better ability to focus on fixing the issues that matter to the actual users.
Open vs. closed source is at least in part a philosophical debate – there’s always going to be people who will prefer open source solutions over proprietary ones, and there’s valid reasons for that. However, only the native runtime and Build Service are closed source; Steroids CLI and the Supersonic library (among other components) are open source on GitHub. Native functionalities can also be expanded on via custom Cordova plugins. And for what it’s worth, we do have solid funding and a strong team – we’re not going anywhere.
Finally, I just posted about our support for Ionic projects with Steroids Tooling – please check that out and give feedback!
I’m happy to answer any other questions about Supersonic/Steroids, so fire away!
Best,
Harri Sarsa
Head of Developer Relations
AppGyver, Inc.
