If you have been looking to build mobile apps but haven’t yet settled on Ionic, now is the best time to make the choice. I’ve compiled a list of reasons why Ionic is heating up and why you will want to be ready to build apps with it.
Ionic is a top 50 GithHub project
Ionic is one of the top 50 projects on GitHub. It is about a year old, and it has been moving up quickly. So what you ask? Simply put, this means a lot of people are marking Ionic as a preferred technology and that means more opportunities. Source.
Ionic is building a powerful platform
Most of Ionic’s power thus far has come from the framework that you use to build mobile interfaces. However Ionic has much more to offer in their platform features. Some features are available today, such as
- Ionic View - A way to share your apps with others without submitting it to a store. Perfect for demoning the app for a client.
- Ionic Creator - A drag and drop visual editor for crafting an app. It has limits, but it can be a great way to visually brainstorm and prototype your app.
- Ionic Push Notifications - In private beta today, but use Ionic’s push notification servers to deliver your app notifications. It can be a pain to handle this yourself!
- Ionic Future Platform - There are other services in the works, such as analytics, design tools, and debugging assistance. This integrated platform will allow you rapid feature development designed to work seamlessly with your app.
The community is amazing
The Ionic community is growing, and they are pretty great. This past week nearly 3,000 people signed up for the Ionic forum (over 41,000 in the past year), and they have generated about 54,000 posts. Stack Overflow has over 1,700 topics for Ionic, with more daily.
The stable 1.0 release is approaching
Some people like to be early adopters, but others can’t afford to deal with the instability and changes of a beta release. The last beta is currently available, and the release candidate is expected soon. Once the release candidate is out, you should not have to worry about the APIs changing underneath you. You can expect more features to be added over time, but that should be a bonus!
Ionic and Angular are working together
Ionic is not just a consumer of Angular in its ecosystem, the team is actually engaged with the development of Angular and working to improve things for the next major releases (not expected for a while yet, so don’t wait!). This gives me great confidence that Ionic and Angular will continue to work well together.
Ionic has a book!
Ok I had to plug the book, but I’m getting close to the final draft for Ionic in Action. I’m excited about it, and if you do grab a copy be sure to let me know how you like it in the author forum!
What about you?
Do you have any reasons why you think Ionic is great? Share them in the comments!