The real purpose of building app with ionic is to develop cross platform mobile app. I am following and developing app in ionic since it was in alpha. I really appreciate how much ionic has grown in past few months. But I can see ionic has very less focus on Android platform. The same app when compiled to IOS, it performs almost perfect but if it is compiled to Android, both UI and performance looks sluggish. I can understand, one of the problem might be because of poor android browsers but another problem might be less commitment of team towards Android platform.
I too agree with this. There should be more focus on making Ionic first class option for Android developers. Android being the largest market share holder needs better attention from ionic community I hope to see Ionic performing better on Android; at least 4.0+ versions.
So developing for android (whether you’re doing it natively or with ionic) has always been a pain. Some of the reasons with ionic though are on us. We were doing things that the android browser couldn’t keep up with and slowly killed performance.
But we’ve worked hard to make sure that things on android have improved in these latest builds. Some of that included switching to a more performant js-animation library and making sure any other css animations are hardware accelerated. Simple things, but they go along way. As far as our commitment towards android, we couldn’t be more committed.
Another idea we’re throwing around is switching the webview to use chrome, instead of the default android browser (on 4.3 and below. Which will bring older android devices up to par with 4.4.
I hope to see Ionic performing better on Android; at least 4.0+ versions.