Earlier in the summer I shared an update on Ionic Cloud and explained that we’re going to be deprecating the Cloud solution and replacing it a powerful suite of tools & services called Ionic Pro, focused more on development and testing rather than mBaaS style services. At that time, there was some uncertainty around the future of two Cloud services – Push and Auth. I wanted to update the community on where we landed with these services, explain our reasoning, and provide some helpful information to anyone using Push and Auth.

What’s happening with Auth and Push

Let me get to the most important stuff first: As of February 1, 2018, we will no longer provide Push and Auth services. Anyone with an existing Cloud account can continue using Push and Auth through January 2018. After that, you’ll need to find an alternative provider.

The Ionic community is already using a number of leading push and auth providers today.

For Push notifications, we recommend AWS Pinpoint, OneSignal, and Firebase, based on their overall popularity and the number of helpful tutorials and docs that should make it easy for you to get set up. Additionally, OneSignal has created a landing page specifically for Ionic Push developers.

For Auth, AWS Cognito, Auth0, and Firebase area all great options. The AWS Cognito team has put together this great guide on using Amazon Cognito with Ionic. Auth0 has a great Getting Started with Ionic and Auth0 blog they recently put together as well.

Finally, the 2017 Ionic Dev Survey is a great resource to see which backend service providers are most popular among Ionic devs.

Why we’ve made this decision

First, we know this sucks – and for that we’re sorry. Changes like this are never easy. Because of that, the decision to make this change is not something we’ve taken lightly.

With that said, we think this is the best decision in the long run for the success of Ionic as a long-term business, and for the value we think we can provide to our users. While Push and Auth have been popular services, there are a lot of other providers out there that did it a lot better than we did. As such, it would be difficult for Ionic to really stand out and deliver something unique that solved a problem someone else wasn’t. At the same time, we felt like there were areas that no one was doing at all, that would help make Ionic the most efficient developer experience in the industry.

So, instead of providing a sub-par mBaaS, we’re choosing to focus on areas of the dev lifecycle where Ionic can make the most impact in the lives of our developers, while letting them choose from a range of highly capable backend service providers for basics like auth and push services. By allowing vendors like AWS, Firebase, Auth0, and OneSignal to focus on the backend, Ionic can better focus on tools & services that make it easy to design, build, test, deploy, and monitor Ionic apps in a way that only Ionic could.

Next steps for Auth and Push users

If you’re an existing Auth or Push user, look for an email follow up with more details on transitioning to other platforms. If you are using Cloud today and have questions about how this could impact your apps, send us a note at help@ionic.io.

Is this it?!?!

Lastly, I wanted to address a perfectly valid question that a number of people have asked lately: is this it? I understand that with so many changes, there’s concern that other services may be next. Let me assure you that this is indeed it. While you may expect some minor changes to how we package up Ionic Pro, we’re really happy with the direction Pro is taking and the early traction its getting from the Ionic community, and don’t plan to make any more changes. It’s extremely painful for us and our users to announce an end of service like this, but we feel it’s best to get it out there and move on – and provide you enough time to plan accordingly and recommend some great alternatives. At this point, I wouldn’t expect any other big changes to Cloud or Ionic Pro.

With that, let me say thanks to the entire community for your support through this difficult, exciting, hopeful chapter in the Book of Ion. We’re thrilled and humbled to have your support. We know this is difficult, but we also know that it’s paving the way to a better world for Ionic and all of its passionate users. Thanks for being an amazing community!