I regret using Ionic for app development

Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by axlee on Saturday April 08, 2023 @08:49PM (#35499119)

Because it seems you have some experience in the field: is there a way to develop and support a multi-platform app in 2023 without suffering? The idea of having to hire 2(x n)FTE to handle developing mobile apps which will, at the end of the day, look and feel the same to the user, is killing me. What's the least worst option out there?

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by dbetteridge on Saturday April 08, 2023 @10:52PM (#35499687)

Nope, you can limit the suffering for your devs by using Expo (RN) or Flutter (Needs Dart).

The issue is as soon as you stray off the well laid path similar to the old create-react-app problems you have to choose "do things their way" or "Suffer all the problems you avoided with the framework + all the problems of the library you added".

For example at work I help maintain a React-Native app that is one of the core parts of our business, We investigated Expo but we use sodium in the app for keypair generation and its not supported. So we can't have any of Expo's benefits because of one unsupported library. (its supported in iOS and Web but not Android...)

* There are packages that implement sodium in expo but they score too poorly on their security scores for us to use them.

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by pjmlp on Sunday April 09, 2023 @05:30AM (#35501142)

Those FTE will need to understand the native SDKs no matter what, when the abstractions leak someone will need to debug them.

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by IshKebab on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:15AM (#35502009)

I think it depends on the app. Some apps have a lot more interaction with the platform than others. E.g. writing a camera app in Flutter is going to be like 80% platform native code. Writing e.g. a GitHub app is probably going to be 0%.

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by pjmlp on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:42AM (#35502194)

If it is 0% most likely is doable as mobile Web, no need for hybrid headaches.

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by IshKebab on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:52AM (#35503883)

Yeah in a lot of cases you definitely could. But well written mobile apps are still better than well written mobile web sites. Sometimes much better depending on the application.

E.g. I would not like to give up the Gmail app and use the web interface.

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Re:I regret using Ionic for app development by robch on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:07AM (#35503427)

I'm currently a Android native developer with 7 years experience and have used Appcelerator/Titanium and Iconic + Angular before that. IMO if you're writting an app that only makes API calls and draws to the screen, then using cross platform SDKs is going to save you time.

But if you need to use any platform specific native SDKs like camera/push notifications or other 3rd party native SDKs, you're going to be in a world of pain.

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