Performance issues were the main reason we shied away from PhoneGap and hybrid apps in the past, so this gave us some confidence that it was time to try them again. Particularly impressive for such a new project.Īccording to the Ionic website, the framework is “Performance Obsessed”. Ionic is essentially a wrapper around the already very popular Apache Cordova framework (think PhoneGap), but comes with its own very powerful CLI tools and a wealth of documentation. Ionic is a relatively new framework for building hybrid mobile apps (web technologies wrapped as native applications) and has only just gone from alpha to beta that said, the repo has been starred nearly 11,000 times and the framework has over 13K followers on Twitter. Having looked at all these factors, we did some research and stumbled across Ionic.
Using Eclipse (although some might love this).Native look and feel from standard UI components in the SDK.(Referring to icons, splash screens, certificates etc.) Slow and unresponsive compared to fully native apps.Web technologies (CSS, HTML, JS) which most developers know well enough.Having built both PhoneGap, Java (Android) and Objective-C (iOS) apps in the past, we were quite aware of the pros and cons, which in our opinion can be summarised as follows: We couldn’t ignore this trend and so earlier this year we took the plunge and completely rebuilt our site with a mobile friendly responsive design.ĭespite now having a very functional and mobile optimised site, with mobile use set to exceed 50% in the next few months, the next logical step was to offer our mobile users a more native experience so we decided build a dedicated app for both Android and iOS. Over the past few years we have watched as mobile (and tablet) usage has soared from just 8% of our traffic in October 2011 to 44% in October 2014. Current: Discover how we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic Frameworkĭiscover how we built our app in 2 weeks using Ionic FrameworkĪirport Parking Shop is an established online comparison website that’s just celebrated its 11th year.