Today we are super excited to announce the public beta of the Ionic Platform, a powerful set of backend services and tools that help take you from development up to scale with all your Ionic or Cordova/PhoneGap apps! We want to make it even easier for web developers to build amazing mobile apps with their existing web dev backgrounds, and this is a major step towards that goal.

Last year when we released the alpha of the platform tools, namely Ionic Push, Deploy, Package, and Analytics, along with Ionic View and Creator, we were overwhelmed with the response. Over 300,000 users signed up in the months that followed, working on hundreds of thousands of Ionic apps and projects.

Over the last 12 months we’ve learned so much about how to build a full stack mobile offering, and we had the opportunity to harden and build out our services to prepare for much larger usage beyond the alpha period. Today’s beta release will soon become our production-ready offering and we are so excited to finally share it with you.



New Service: User Authentication & Management

With the Ionic Platform Beta, we’ve added a major new service that makes it possible to manage and better interact with users of your app: Ionic Auth.

Launching today, Ionic Auth makes it easy to authenticate users with email/password, social services across major networks like Twitter and Facebook, and existing auth systems. Additionally, we are expanding support in other platform services for operations such as targeting push notifications and delivering app updates to segments of users.

Users are core to nearly every mobile app, and so we have and will continue to bake Ionic Auth into the rest of the Ionic Platform services. Make sure to head over to the new Ionic Auth docs covering this new service!

A Brand New Website

With the alpha release, we’ve also launched a totally new and improved Ionic.io. We’ve added a lot more information on all the services provided and some fun visuals to get you pumped up.

If you’re confused about all the various Ionic offerings, take a look at our Discover page to see everything we offer across the Ionic product line.

Existing Alpha Users

Important: we are deprecating all Ionic alpha services in favor of the new beta platform, and we will continue to keep the alpha services and APIs up for 60 days. We will be shutting down the alpha APIs after the 60 day period!. If this is a major issue for you please let us know ASAP.

With the beta, your app will most likely require changes to utilize the latest services and continue working past our shutdown date of alpha services. We’ve put together a migration overview which gives you a high level overview of the changes to each of the different services and their components. The docs have been updated to reflect changes for the beta and deserve a re-read of any relevant (or new) sections as they relate to the functionality your using in your app.

We’ve rebuilt a number of core services such as Ionic Push and Deploy to better scale up with the increased demand during the alpha period. If you’ve tried the alpha versions and ran into issues, we hope you give it another try.

Pricing

One of the most common questions we received during the alpha period was: how much is the Ionic Platform going to cost? We intentionally deferred releasing pricing so we could learn more about how developers were using the platform and build pricing around that.

Today we’ve taken the wraps off the upcoming Ionic Platform pricing, and you can check it out on the new pricing page.

A couple things to note: this pricing is not taking effect yet. We are going to have a short beta period to make sure everything is good to go, then we will start charging with the production-ready version of Ionic Platform in a few months’ time. We will have another announcement when that happens.

Most importantly, we want your feedback on the pricing. If it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work with your needs let us know, we are putting this out there to get feedback and learn how to optimally price the Ionic Platform services.

Getting Started

To get started with the new Ionic Platform and start sending push notifications, deploying real-time updates to apps in the app store, authenticate users, build iOS apps from Windows, and more, check out the official Ionic Platform Docs.

We want to thank everyone who helped test and improve the Ionic Platform services during the alpha period. It’s because of your feedback that we were able to move forward with building the right product to help as many Ionic developers as possible.

Over the coming weeks we will be releasing content and tutorials on how to best use the new services. Until then, let us know what you think about the beta!