Dear Ionites,

You’ve been patient. You’ve submitted pull requests. You’ve been active on the forums. You’ve built incredible apps. You’ve presented and formed communities all over the world. You’ve supported one another and inspired us to collectively push the limits of what’s possible. Today, all that dedication and tenacity pays off…

I’m incredibly excited and proud to officially announce that, after 14 betas and 5 RCs, the final release of Ionic 1.0.0, “uranium-unicorn,” is here!

This is such an important milestone for all of us here on the team, as well as for all of you, who have so passionately shaped Ionic’s development since the very beginning. Your enthusiastic support of the Ionic SDK continues to blow our minds. Ionic has truly become a force to be reckoned with.

The Ionic apps we’ve seen have surpassed our wildest dreams. Sworkit was featured in the Health and Wellness section in the iOS App Store, as was Pacifica, which has also been featured in Buzzfeed and Gizmodo UK. Mallzee was selected as one of the Best New Apps in the App Store. Remente was also featured as a best new app in the App Store, and EskomSePush made the top 10 in the South African App Store. Some of the largest and most well-known companies are using Ionic to build enterprise apps. We know there are more success stories like these out there, so please share your app with us. We love seeing new Ionic apps!

Ionic is now one of the top open source projects on GitHub, with over 16,000 Stars and over 600,000 Ionic apps created. We’ve closed nearly 3,000 GitHub issues and have merged 186 pull requests. 169 awesome contributors have made Ionic a better SDK for hybrid mobile app development than we ever could have imagined.



Going stable

What’s interesting about this release is that, unlike many of our previous ones that included massive overhauls, 1.0 doesn’t actually seek to make very many big changes! Instead, it has become the most stable and battle-tested version to date, the “final form” of 5 RCs.

With that said, I want to share some of the awesome new features included in Ionic 1.0 that I think will make your development experience even more enjoyable, and also give you a sneak peek of where we plan to go from here:

Native scrolling is now officially supported. Thanks to the community for all your help testing this out. This is a massive performance improvement on Android. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Swipe to go back now uses interactive transitions, rather than static animations, to animate the nav bar title and back buttons.

Collection-repeat has been massively overhauled.

We’ve improved support around Beta 14’s navigation changes.

SVG spinners allow you to encapsulate icons inside a directive, without having to deal with the SVG markup.

Platform Continuity: We’ve improved platform-specific styles for things like action sheets. And this is just the start…

We’ve significantly improved keyboard support for modals and orientation change.

We’ve also improved Windows Phone support (yes, we hear you)! Ionic 1.0 now allows the special ms-appx protocol Cordova on WP uses. We’ve created a fix for ng-show in IE and gotten rid of the IE “squish” effect. We’ve added a fixed range input display and set the default spinner to one that animates properly on Windows. We’ve also improved click/drag/scrolling behavior.



Looking ahead

Going forward, we plan to make the following additional improvements to Ionic 1.0:

We’ll be expanding our Windows Phone support. There are a number of issues around tap/click/activator behavior, because Windows uses pointer events, instead of touch events. We’ll be setting up a complete Windows testing environment at Ionic HQ and working closely with some Microsoft team members to address Windows Phone issues more directly.

We’ll be adding to the existing collection of Ionic Visual Studio Templates, as part of our partnership with Microsoft.

Native scrolling will continue to be developed and improved.

More than a framework

At the same time, we’re going to be opening up some early previews of our Ionic Platform services…

Imagine easily adding powerful tools like push notifications and app analytics to all your apps with the click of a button. Build native binaries without having the native SDKs installed, and update your app without submitting it to the app store. Sounds pretty cool, right? Here’s some more info on what you can look forward to from the Ionic Platform:

Ionic Push will let you easily send push notifications to multiple platforms, schedule marketing notifications, and target specific user groups, all through an intuitive UI as well as a REST API.

Ionic Deploy will allow you update your Ionic applications without having to resubmit to app stores and keeps track of history, so you can rollback to previous versions and undo changes at any time.

Ionic Analytics will track every part of the user’s interaction within your Ionic app to easily identify pain points and areas on which to focus (We’ll even have heatmaps!).

Ionic Package will be an automatic build service for apps, so you’ll be able to build a production-ready iOS version of your app without a Mac, for example.

The Ionic View app, which is already available on iOS and Android, lets you preview and share your apps live on the device, without ever going through the app stores.

The newly released Playground lets you hack on Ionic demos and projects right in the browser, without installing anything.

Lastly, Creator offers rapid app prototyping using drag-and-drop components. You’re going to see Creator get a lot more love in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out!

Many more services are in the works, but I’m not going to spoil everything…

Until next time!

So, we will continue to develop Ionic past the 1.0.0 release, adding many of the features listed above. And, of course, our support for 1.0 will continue for a long time, so you needn’t worry! At the same time, we are already actively developing Ionic 2.0 to coincide with the timing of Angular 2.0. Both of our teams are working closely together to make sure the next versions are phenomenal. I am so incredibly excited for this but can’t say very much about it just yet. Trust me when I say we have a lot of exciting things in store.

We are so humbled by all of the dedicated developers around the world who have tested new features and services, given us feedback, submitted pull requests, and helped others on the Forum, all of which played a major part in getting us to this point. Huge thanks to all of these great people. We would not be here without you.

So with that, go ahead and give Ionic 1.0 a spin! We think you’re really going to love it. Thank you for joining us on this journey. It has been an unbelievably exciting ride, and we’re thrilled to have you along with us.

To the moon!