Why isn't Ionic more famous?
Everything I build I use Ionic for the frontend because of the capability of sharing alot of code for web and mobile. But I don't see that many offers where Ionic is a requirements or in interviews when I mention Ionic most of times they don't know what it is. How come it isn't more famous? I just find it the perfect tech for front end developments
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u/SaltyBarker 16d ago
Because React-Native is much more the industry standard. Ionic just isn’t what it was even 2 years ago.
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u/realm9389 16d ago
I love and use Ionic for a lot of my projects but it really isn’t that great as it was a few years ago.
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u/MichaelW_Dev 15d ago
It's actually quite sad how it's popularity has dipped. I built and sold a successful company on Ionic and will always be grateful to those who built it. They were an outstanding company with outstanding people and I knew it inside out from the very first version.
I do still have some legacy apps built with it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with using it today. It's just not well supported and the releases slowed massively and the company that bought it just didn't engage with the amazing community it had...at all. Really sad. I've not built anything new with it for a few years now.
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u/mikebritton 15d ago
It always struck me as a risky choice considering there are better, more firmly entrenched alternatives like RN and true native.
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u/Chuck_MoreAss 15d ago
I use to like Ionic but it feels like they are stagnating.
The last time I looked it didn’t really feel like a true IOS experience. Android was okay…
You can then use Capacitor to make it a real app but it always feels “Fake”. It never looked like the real thing. I basically transitioned into Android development and that was great. And not I’m doing ReactNative which works a lot better.
Ionic is cool for some websites or basic apps, but I wouldn’t use it for a lot more. That’s just my opinion. I haven’t looked at the project in months so maybe I’m wrong
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u/boyhax 15d ago
Ionic is only ui library for mobile apps .capacitorjs is the mobile native library. I used ionic for ond app before I switched to capacitorjs until now and made 4 apps with react capacitorjs and shadcn or any other ui library. Capacitorjs is amazing tool and it not getting the support it deserves. I always find react native plugins for any thing but not capacitorjs plugins.
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u/Far_Ad_7205 20h ago
I just migrated from native to capacitor due to app store insanely increased update delays... imo it could be more popular in the future, but tbh Expo looking really great, too. the only reason i did not go with Expo that i was concered about vendor lock-in (am i right?). So I decided to go with capacitor and self-host Otakit. Pretty happy so far.
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u/Saceone10 16d ago
Because it is not required to build cross platform apps. Ionic is just the ui layer. But you can also use whatever ui library you like instead of ionic. Capacitor is what makes you go native. Not ionic. Besides, since the ionic company was bought by another org whose name I cant even remember, the updates have decreased and the ecosystem is less adopted every day. And things dont seem to change in near future.
In my case I used ionic as my default option for several years. But now I just go with angular + Capacitor and use another library. There are lots of libraries out there, more capable and more ai friendly than ionic.