A year ago I wrote a series of posts on how to build a mobile app with Ionic. The Ionic Team have been working on the next version of Ionic and will be releasing that in beta soon, so now is a good time to revisit that tutorial and update it for Ionic 2. This tutorial series is for web developers who don't have any previous experience with Ionic.

This tutorial is for Ionic 2, you can find the Ionic 1.x tutorial here.

Update: Ionic 3 has now been released, and you should still be able to follow this tutorial series to create an Ionic 3 app. However, I won't be updating this tutorial series anymore. I have a free email course that I will keep up to date with the latest version of Ionic, you can sign up for it below .

This tutorial is part of a multi-part tutorial:

Part 1 - Introduction to Hybrid Mobile Apps and Ionic (this post)

Part 2 - Set Up your Development Environment

Part 3 - Introduction to TypeScript & ES6

Part 4 - Introduction to Angular 2

Part 5 - Build an Ionic 2 App

Part 6 - Navigating between Pages

Part 7 - Test on Emulators and Mobile Devices

What is a Hybrid Mobile App?

A hybrid mobile app is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is contained in a native wrapper so that it can be installed on a mobile device.

This allows web developers to build mobile apps without having to learn the native programming languages (e.g., Objective-C, Swift, Java). It also means that you can have one codebase for all the different platforms.

Cordova/PhoneGap

The most popular native wrapper is Cordova (the engine that powers PhoneGap) and has been around since 2009. Cordova is responsible for loading your HTML/CSS/JavaScript in a web view when the mobile app is started.

The other big feature of Cordova are plugins that allow you to communicate with the native features of your mobile device, for instance accessing the Contacts list or Camera, using just JavaScript.

Ionic 2

The Ionic Framework uses Cordova and provides you with a UI framework that mimics the native UI. That means that you don't have to worry about implementing a native-like UI and debugging all the quirks between web view implementations on different platforms.

Ionic 2 is built on top of Angular 2, a very popular framework (made by Google) for developing web applications.

Both frameworks are completely rebuilt from scratch offering better performance and simplified code.

What will happen to Ionic 1?

The Ionic Team have said that they will continue working on Ionic 1 for the foreseeable future and have recently released a major update with a huge list of bug fixes.

So if you're looking to build something that needs to go in production soon, you might want to use the current stable Ionic version (which depends on Angular 1).

Read my 6-part tutorial to get started with Ionic 1.

Keep in mind that if you have an Ionic 1 app and want to upgrade to Ionic 2, you'll encounter many breaking changes.

For an impression of what you can build with Ionic, there is the official showcase on the Ionic website, but there is also this unofficial list in the forums.

What about React Native, NativeScript, etc.?

In the past year we've seen the rise of compile-to-native frameworks like React Native (made by Facebook) and NativeScript (built by Telerik). These frameworks allow you to build native apps by writing them in JavaScript and compiling to native.

I haven't had time to explore these frameworks yet, but I do think that native apps will always give you a better performance than hybrid apps, because you won't have that extra layer in-between (the web view).

However, depending on the type of app you're building, this difference in performance is probably not noticeable to the user and that is what matters in the end.

Mobile devices are getting faster with every new release and so are the mobile browsers. With the support of Service Workers in the browser we can now even build web applications that will behave just like an app on mobile devices negating the need for app stores.

Why you should go hybrid

One of the cool things about hybrid apps is that you can update your app without having to republish it through the app stores. Your app is basically just a bunch of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files and you can use a service like Ionic Deploy to update any of those files in the app. This is especially useful on iOS where it takes more than a week to publish apps.

Also, if you don't have a good eye for design but still want to build a beautiful app, you can buy themes for your Ionic app on the Ionic Marketplace or on Ionic Themes.

So if you're a web developer and if you want to leverage your current coding skills, the fastest way to get started with app development is by building a hybrid app. Ionic is the most popular hybrid mobile app framework out there and has an amazing community who will help you out whenever you get stuck.

In Part 2 we will set up our development environment and install the tools we need along with Cordova and Ionic.

Ionic 2 Forum

Ionic Blog

Join Ionic Worldwide on Slack

