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Discussion on: Good bye ReactNative, hello Ionic.

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daaitch profile image
Philipp Renoth

Hey Keff,

what exactly is wrong with Ionic?
To be fair, Ionic is just a couple of web-components not even very opinionated because they try to simulate iOS and Android behavior. You can use the big three Angular, React, Vue or just web-components. If you don't like Ionic UI/UX then put whatever you like in to the capacitor box. And finally if you don't like web-apps at all what do you use?

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

I should've said Ionic/Capacitor actually, the whole setup. Worth noting that I haven't tried ionic in a few years, maybe the problems I had have been resolved.

I worked with ionic for mobile app development for a couple of years (iconic with angular), and from my experience, it's a mess, prone to bugs, excessive templating (with angular at least), strange conflicts with plugins, and overall a pain to work with when the project gets bigger. I guess it's up to the developers to prevent this, but having tried other solution I can tell with confidence that quite a few of this problems can be solved by designing the framework correctly.

For me the biggest drawback is the amount of layers that Ionic has, making it really easy for one of them to give you problems.

My hate might be subjective though, I did not have the best experience working with it and it might've not been the frameworks fault... nevertheless I don't think I fancy trying it again, not react native either for that matter. I really don't like using JS/TS frameworks for these scenarios, they allow too much.

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

I get what you're saying, I used an old version of Ionic, 6 or 7 years ago and it was okay but not ideal ... however I think you should ultimately base your judgement on an up to date version - and don't forget that you can now use React or Vue with Ionic (I used Angular 1 which was okay-ish, wouldn't touch Angular anymore).

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Yup I agree, I'm aware of this as I mentioned in the comment, it might've been a mix of working on a badly maintained project, old ionic versions + angular 2+ plus other factors.

When I worked with Ionic, React was beeing added, then Vue was also added. But I did not have the chance to try them out, either way I also don't enjoy React at all, vue is alright though.

I probably should try it out again, though I don't fancy it at all xD

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leob profile image
leob

Yeah I also like Vue more than React :)

I might be dabbling a bit with Ionic for an MVP in an upcoming project, although I told them "do yourself a favour and use Flutter instead", lol ... but we'll see.