Winning Combination of AngularJS & Ionic for Hybrid Mobile App Development

We discuss why Ionic and AngularJS is a winning combination for hybrid mobile application development.

One App for Many Platforms

The two most lucrative platforms for mobile applications continue to be iOS and Android, but the other platforms, especially BlackBerry and Windows Phone cannot be completely written off either. For enterprise applications, especially in businesses with the BYOD policies, hybrid is a logical option. jQuery Mobile is the predecessor of Ionic and it is still available for development. However, ionic picked pace for its versatility and the extensive development forum that frequently add new features and have helped the platform grow.

Ionic Goodies!

There’s very little not to love about Ionic – it is great for UI, debugging, performance and build. The platform has dozens of components with extensible options. The quality of the components are exceptional and their interaction with one another seamless. With the new version, the application layout depends on the device and Ionic follows specific guidelines of individual platforms for element display. Intricate details of transition, styling and other platform-specific behaviour is also followed. Developers can use $ionicConfigProvider to overwrite particular styles, transition or behaviour.

Ionic All the Way

Cross-platform application helps you create a larger market base and gives you greater access to users. Ionic combines AngularJS, HTML5+CSS and uses Cordova to access native device functions. It offers great support and extensive possibilities with features that are naturally integrated as native apps on a shared base code.

Creating the Components

Most app developers will complain about the effort required to create icons and splashscreens for hybrid app development. Individual parameters such as height, width, density, device and a host of other things have to be taken into consideration. In order to do complete justice, multiple splasschreens and icons will have to be created. On Ionic, you just have to create two files - .psd, .ai or .png within the resources directory, specify the template and you are done.

Performance of Ionic Apps

Hybrid applications are generally not renowned for their performance. However, Ionic has optimized UI components with embedded Crosswalk in the CLI to ensure optimum performance across platforms.

Ionic and AngularJS

Ionic is a frontend SDK and with AngularJS it facilitates building cross-platform apps with services such as analytics and push notifications integrated. Ionic has AngularJS directives and components built into it. The JavaScript portions of Ionic apps are built using AngularJS. Whereas Ionic works with Angular 1.0, Ionic 2 works with Angular 2. Angular extends HTML with its UI components and directives.

Ionic platform with its JavaScript base gives greater access to mobile developers to multiple platforms without any performance compromise. Finally, mobile app developers can hope to build complex applications using a hybrid development platform.