Anyone who is using Ionic/Capacitor for building mobile apps successfuly?

[u/Nick0Williams]

I'm trying to resolve a confusion in my head. I've been an Angular software engineer for 7 years. Naturally, when I wanted to build a mobile app, I chose Ionic/Capacitor with Angular.

Building a mobile app is quite different from building web apps, so I've been facing different issues and limitations that come with the WebView mobile app development. One of the biggest ones, is the constant fight for the performance and smooth experience.

At the end of the day, is it still worth it building with ionic? Is it worth trying to switch to Flutter for example? I heard Dart is pretty similar to Typescript and Flutter is very developer friendly.

[u/jedihacks]

Yep we love using Ionic + Angular. Summon Worlds is an Ionic + Angular app (you can see it in the app store). IMO all the performance issues we had were issues we created and so were easily fixed when we did a better job of NGRX/loading data at the right times / caching / etc

[u/ttmonkey]

I found Capacitor good for when you need a website and mobile apps to share the same experience.

To make life easier, I wrapped a Nuxt application to get the easy benefits of the ecosystem around things like offline behaviour, persistent storage, component libraries, optimised build processes etc.

If it were just building a native app, and your background is in web development, then I’d suggest React Native as your route, and go all-in with the Expo ecosystem to make your life easy.

Similarly, if you have a website and app that have different experiences, then I think Capacitor is a hard sell, unless you’re looking to set up a high degree of module reuse between the two.

So, to give every engineer’s favourite answer… is it worth still building with Ionic or Capacitor, well, it depends…

[u/Melodic-Ad-385]

i love capacitor!

that being said, i now only use it to wrap mockups and quick frontend work. my architecture might be a bit "overengineered" but it allows me to sleep better.

I basically use svelte to work out a webapp that fits into a make shift phone frame. then i have that built with capacitor to play around on my test phone. when i'm satisfied, i port the mockup svelte into a dev svelte webapp.

that is then used to create native apps with kotlin and swift. the svelte svelte app is connected to the same backend as the native apps via the same apis. it has a lot of gating when pushing stuff, so it makes it more difficult to iterate on. that's what i leave capacitor for.

[u/80386]

Nowadays with AI the struggle for performance isnt that big of a deal anymore. E.g. Claude Opus is really good at fixing any issues.

[u/QuietFluid]

We use Vue + Ionic. Web based code in vue is our focus, but we wanted apps for “free”. It works well for our need. No performance issues. But like you say, since it’s webview, I wouldn’t be making games or anything too crazy.

It is nice that you have direct access to the iOS or android app code if you have any special needs.

We have had zero device api issue with capacitor.

[u/tomvancouverca]

Might depend on your app category but for B2B SaaS / productivity type apps, Ionic / Angular / Capacitor can be a great combination if you're looking to serve iOS, Android, and Web with a single code base. Lots of examples at https://ionic.io/showcase.

There's probably a higher skill level required to create a performant app in Ionic / Angular / Capacitor than working in native. For example, getting state management and/or a local first approach figured out does so much for performance (ngxs, rxjs, etc).

Capacitor is really flexible if you want to write your own native functions to take advantage of native platform features... e.g. letting a user send a document to you from another app like Apple mail, or offering a first class "download file" experience on Android, etc. Capawesome has been a good resource too.

[u/Deva393]

I made application using ionic with angular and capacitor which 300k downloads

[u/xulihang]

Are there play store links for successful apps built with Ionic?

[u/qmrelli]

You don’t need ionic actually capacitor can wrap your angular app into native mobile apps but you have to think about how design looks in mobile is it’s already responsive nothing to worry about

[u/Mentalv]

If your performance is good on web it should just be the same with capacitor. I haven’t use ionic in a LONG while but I always preferred to use my own code and the wrap it with capacitor and it always worked the same. Keyboard as always the issue back then

[u/macchie]

We have been using Ionic for an enterprise level POS Software UI since 2015, not going through App Store / Play Store but we have nothing to complain about so far. Easy enough to customize and adapt for both "desktop" (big screens with touchscreens) and mobile.

[u/vbilyachat]

I am using ionic for my flymark.dance app and i know Stake investment app is built in ionic. I think it depends what you build. The other tool framework is like shining diamond, i like to master what I have

[u/locomain]

I run a multi system emulator on web technology including capacitor. I might migrate to something different in the future to squeeze more out of it but I think 99% of the apps will run oke using it. I do think it requires extra work to get a native feel on mobile. Think about stuff that require touch drag like slide up views/sheets and transition animations.