We’re officially hiring for a number of engineering roles at Ionic. I wanted to quickly expand on what those roles entail and what the day to do day looks like, and also share some insight into what we do here at Ionic day in and day out!

Senior Engineer – Desktop IDE (Studio)

Link to job

Want to come build awesome desktop developer tools that make app dev easier than ever before? We’re looking for a strong frontend engineer that is comfortable with modern frontend app dev, such as React, Angular, or Stencil, along with state management systems like Redux (or otherwise), and with production experience using Node.js. You should have experience building complex frontend apps, though don’t worry if you haven’t done much Electron development.

This is a unique role focused on building a desktop IDE for Ionic that we are calling Ionic Studio. Studio is currently out in an early preview, and has seen some really exciting early traction already. We hope to roll it out to the whole Ionic community one day, expecting to have millions of developers using Studio as their main Ionic developer tool.

Studio has some really fun, thorny problems. For example, how do you build a developer tool that has a visual, drag-and-drop aspect, and is accessible to beginners…while at the same time treating code as the source of truth, and letting advanced users run with it and never feel forced to leave the tool?

You’d be joining a team of three along with a technical Product Manager that will really impress you and maximize the impact of your work.

For this role, we are really looking for someone in Madison, WI or willing to relocate. However, we are open to remote in the US for the right candidate.

Interested? Apply here.

Solutions Architect

Link to job

Ionic’s primary business is working with large enterprise companies as they deploy mission critical apps, both for their end customers and for their employees and partners.

This means we get a front seat to some pretty huge apps. Want to help the team that is deploying Ionic apps to a restaurant chain you and your family likely eat at and will be used by millions of diners? Or an app you’d use every time you get on a train in the US? Or work with well known companies that are deploying hundreds of Ionic apps to power their whole business?

The Solutions Architect gets a front row seat, and works directly with these teams, both to support Ionic software those teams are deploying, and to provide mobile and app development expertise.

According to one of our Solution Architects, the reason he loves this role is that he gets to work on a variety of problems, and every day is different. He’s been able to constantly learn and refine his development experience, and work with a constant stream of new technologies. It’s a position that offers a ton of variety and opportunity to learn. On top of that, being able to share his knowledge and expertise with teams is incredibly rewarding.

This role would be perfect for someone experienced with Ionic, especially one with Angular experience. If you’re comfortable using Ionic 3 and 4 and know your way around Angular, then you have a ton to offer enterprise teams building with Ionic.

For this role, we’re looking for either Madison, WI or remote in the US. This role is very remote friendly.

You can read more about Ionic’s business and how this role fits in on our 2019 Business Update.

Interested? Apply here

Questions?

Ionic is a rapidly growing startup that is commercializing open source app development tools and technology. We have thousands of customers and hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprises that we work closely with. Ionic is unique in the VC-backed startup world in that we are being deliberate about being cash flow positive (i.e. profitable) instead of growing recklessly and relying on outside capital.

The company itself was started by an engineer (myself) and a designer (Ben Sperry). At the core, we are an engineering company and value building awesome, well-designed software above all. You’d be joining a passionate, highly creative team, working with talented folks that are quite literally shaping the face of the frontend technology ecosystem.

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any questions about any of these roles or about Ionic the company.

Today we’re excited to introduce support for Capacitor to Ionic Appflow, covering all features such as cloud-based native builds, real-time updates, and CI/CD automation.

If you’re already a user of Appflow and Capacitor, feel free to skip down to the section below, Setting Up Capacitor, for instructions on how to get started.

Ionic Appflow is a Mobile DevOps solution for developers and teams building apps with Ionic. It helps increase agility and app quality while speeding up time-to-market by automating key phases of the development lifecycle. By generating and streamlining the native app build process, shipping real-time updates, and organizing approval workflows, your team is free to focus on the good stuff (innovation).

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This post was written by community member Masahiko Sakakibara. He is a Web Native App Developer (using JavaScript and PHP) and organizer of the Ionic Japan User Group. Recently, he’s started to use Capacitor and is currently developing plugins for Facebook Login and Admob. Follow him on Twitter @rdlabo.

Ionic 4 provides excellent performance out-of-the-box. Even so, I’m a fan of pushing the limits of my web applications. In this post, I’ll be covering some recent experiments I conducted that look at how to improve the performance of Angular within an Ionic 4 app. These hypotheses included:

• Using Eager Loading (Instead of Lazy Loading)
• Preloading Ionic Components
• Prefetching JavaScript files using a Service Worker

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We’re halfway through 2019, and I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and share a bit about what is going on at Ionic the company.

We don’t often talk about the “business side” of Ionic, at least not in the way that we do our open source stuff. Part of that is because we don’t want to confuse people into thinking we’re becoming all-commercial and stopping our open source efforts, but a big part of that is because our commercial offerings are largely focused on bigger teams which make up a relatively small part of the community, and all of our business is fueled fundamentally by our open source work anyways.

Making money and open source are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we think that open source projects that are sustainable and have a real business model on top are one of the best project structures in the ecosystem. For Ionic the company, our open source software powers a huge chunk of our top of funnel, not to mention the core fabric of our product offering, meaning most of our customers started out by being users of our open source projects, and we are known best in the community for our open source work. For the community, that means our open source efforts are the most important thing that we do, so our interests are highly aligned around creating the best open source app development platform in the world.

We’ve always been driven at Ionic not solely by traditional business metrics, but by usage, adoption, and quality metrics first, with the belief that you have to get those right first in order to get the business metrics right. At the same time, investing in open source is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. We realized that if we could crack the nut on an innovative and strong business model on top, we would have our own nuclear reactor of sorts: a reliable supply of resources to build out the open source platform, with a natural and compelling hook to introduce commercial offerings to teams that need them on top.

So, I would like to talk today about that open source business model we’ve built, how it works, how it’s working today, and where we plan to take it from here.

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Well hello there, Ionic community! I wanted to take a moment and tell a story about a hashtag on Twitter. This hashtag brought so many smiles to my face and everyone at the Ionic office that we decided it deserved more notoriety.

This is the story of how #MyIonicStory came to be and why it matters so much to us.

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This week, we’re excited to introduce Ionic Auth Connect, a new security solution that makes it easy to add single sign-on and secure user authentication to any of your Ionic apps.

Auth Connect provides a simplified interface for developers attempting to implement authentication flows using common authentication services such as Microsoft Active Directory, AWS Cognito, Auth0, or any auth provider that uses the OpenID Connect protocol.

Before I get into the details of why we built Auth Connect and which problems it solves, it’s helpful to start with a quick primer on how authentication flows work — and the common pitfalls that you’re likely to encounter if implementing auth on your own. Anyone who has recently attempted to add an auth workflow to a mobile app will appreciate how complicated it can be.

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Flutter has been out of preview for about six months now, and in that time we’ve gotten quite a few questions about how it compares with Ionic. Having taken a close look at what Google’s latest development framework has to offer, we put together a thorough comparison guide that walks through the key similarities and differences between Ionic and Flutter. Of course, we’re slightly biased in our outlook, but we’ve tried to keep this comparison as fact-based and balanced as possible.

I encourage anyone who’s interested in this topic to check out our guide for the full details, but here’s the very short version.

>>>> Download Ionic vs Flutter Guide here <<<<

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It’s been just a hair over 500 days since the last Ionic Show.

That’s far too long. Today, we’re excited to be back with a vengeance: a movie-length Ionic Show episode covering all the latest Ionic news! 🎉

In this episode of the Ionic Show, Max and Ben bring on Josh Thomas and Matt Netkow to cover Ionic 4, Capacitor, Stencil One, and a community Q&A. Some of the highlights include…

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One of the very special things about Ionic and Capacitor is that a huge bulk of your app development can happen right in a browser on your desktop. That means full access to your traditional desktop web development tools (Chrome/Safari/Firefox dev tools) and the development velocity of building without having to recompile or deploy to a simulator or device.

One of the guiding design goals of Capacitor, Ionic’s new native web app container project that runs your web app natively on iOS, Android, Electron, and the web as a Progressive Web App, was to increase the amount of time you can spend developing your app on desktop before having to mess with simulators or devices.

On top of that, building web-first means that your app will likely run well as a Progressive Web App with minimal additional work, assuming you’re able to achieve the functionality your app needs with Web APIs.

Let’s take a look at how that works.

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How to manage state in your app can often be the biggest and most impactful architectural decision you make.

Unfortunately, there is no standard practice for state management. Developers have to choose between a wide variety of techniques and libraries (many of them 3rd party), including Redux, MobX, state “tunneling,” singleton state services, or just hacking it together. Some of these solutions are optimized for large apps, and some for small ones.

With React Hooks, however, we finally have a state management technique that is both native to the framework, and a good fit for a huge swathe of apps (except, perhaps, very large ones).

If you aren’t familiar with Hooks in React, go read our introduction to Using React Hooks in Ionic React, it offers a primer on the new APIs and how to build basic apps with them. We will gloss over that in this post.

Let’s jump in.

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