The first Stencil minor release of 2022 is here, and it’s a big one. With the release of Stencil v2.13, Stencil now includes support for Jest 27! Jest sits at the core of Stencil testing, so we’ve been working hard to ensure that Stencil continues to support the latest version of Jest. This has been a highly anticipated feature, and we are so excited that it is now available for the Stencil community.
Stencil v2.13.0 includes support for Jest v27, but does not require any project to upgrade their version of Jest at this time. You can upgrade Stencil and continue to use any previous version of Jest that you currently have in your workflow with no breaking changes.
Since we shipped our 4.0 version of Ionic Angular, Ionic has provided a core package called@ionic/angular-toolkit. This package provides two features for Angular apps:
Now, Angular Toolkit has reached a point where it makes more sense to split the two functionalities into their own respective packages. So, let me introduce to you a new package for Cordova apps that are built with Angular: @ionic/cordova-builders.
Over the weekend there was a post circulating online about challenges finding support for a mobile app built with Flutter. The author was running into bugs with the Flutter core and with community extensions, and was stuck because their Flutter issue received no fix nor was it prioritized by the team, and many of the community extensions the developer explored were not adequately maintained. They completely hit a wall.
This got me thinking about a question I see too many developers and teams forgetting to ask until it’s too late: who is going to support the mobile platform and framework you choose to build your next app?
These days developers are making a lot of choices when it comes to the technologies their company will use. It’s easy to just follow hype or perceived popularity when it comes to making those decisions. I find that developers often aren’t thinking about what happens when the rubber meets the road and the project is running into problems with the chosen technology stack and the team needs help.
The Android App Bundle (AAB) publishing format includes an app’s compiled code and resources as well as defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. Introduced in 2018, Google Play uses the app bundle to generate and optimize APKs for distribution for different device configurations and languages. This makes your app smaller and faster to download, which can lead to more installs.
AABs supersede the Android application package (APK) format and as of August 2021, Google Play requires all new apps to be published as AABs. Fortunately, migrating from the APK format to AAB is not too difficult. There are two steps: generating an AAB binary and configuring Play signing in Google Play.
Many teams today are struggling to build robust end-to-end tests for their apps, often giving up on testing their native app at all or using a web-only solution that fails to provide an adequate test of the final production native app that will run in users’ hands.
At Ionic, we’re making a big push in 2022 to help teams build and scale robust end-to-end (E2E) tests for their Ionic and Capacitor/Cordova apps, and today we are taking our first step on that journey by releasing a reference Ionic app with end-to-end testing built in using what we consider to be the best stack for building Web Native end-to-end tests.
Let’s dig into the reference example to see Ionic’s opinion on how developers should build Web Native end-to-end tests:
New to end-to-end testing? Think of it as testing the actual app that users will use by writing tests that simulate user interaction. It’s often the top of the Testing Pyramid and is the best way to verify the app that will ship to end users actually works.
The second annual Enterprise App Summit was a roaring success! Thanks to all our speakers and sponsors from the Ionic community who attended.
For this year’s summit, we developed a cross-platform conference application for attendees which included information about each speaker, an event schedule with a description of each session, and even a swag giveaway for registered attendees!
Built with Ionic technology including Live Updates, Capacitor 3, and Ionic’s own UI framework Ionic 6, this app is designed to be updated quickly to bring the latest information to event participants, and provide a seamless experience across any device.
Although the conference is over, this app serves as a reference for any developer looking to build a conference app for their events using Ionic technology.
Download the app on your device to check it out:
Or, you can watch this short fireside chat where I discuss the app’s highlights:
Read on to get a behind-the-scenes look into how we designed, built, and shipped the app.
2021 was a huge year for Ionic, both the company and the community. Ionic’s business saw significant growth, now counting over 300+ enterprise customers and many thousands of community customers, all powering their app development with Ionic’s enterprise-grade app development platform.
This year also saw significant investment in the open source technologies underpinning Ionic’s platform, with many major releases across the Ionic stack.
With that, let’s take a look at what the team shipped in 2021!
This year, we:
With that, we’re going to catch our breath and get some much deserved rest after a massive year. We look forward to joining you back in ‘22 with another year of big updates across the Ionic stack.
From Twitter to Slack to in person meetups, we get tons of questions everyday from developers using Ionic’s technologies. Over time, we’ve started to understand what questions are most commonly asked by Ionic users, both new and experienced. In an effort to help answer these questions, we’ve created a new “FAQ” tag in the Ionic forum! Posts tagged with “FAQ” are meant to help answer some of the most common questions we receive. You can filter for all FAQs by opening the “all tags” dropdown and selecting “FAQ”.
This is a guest post from Dayana Jabif, Ionic Insider and co-founder of Ionic Themes and Angular Templates. where she helps build great UI templates for developers to get started with. Dayana writes often about what you can do with Ionic, Angular, and Firebase.
Images, audios, videos, text documents, pdfs, you name it. Files are part of our everyday life so learning how to handle them in our applications is a crucial task. In this tutorial, you will learn how to upload and download images to firebase storage from an Ionic app. We will explain how to handle both public and protected files. There were many use cases that came to my mind while writing this tutorial, for example: a learning app with public and private content where private content is only available upon subscription. Although this guide is about Firebase Storage, it’s important to mention that there are many other storage options available, such as Amazon s3.
Cloud Storage for Firebase is built for app developers who need to store and serve user-generated content, such as photos or videos. Files can be either public or protected using security rules to determine who has access to them. Firebase Storage can be used for any type of files, but in this tutorial we will focus on images.
We included examples of both cases: a section with public files visible to everyone and a private section, only accessible through authentication, where files are restricted. This means that just the logged user can access them.
Depending on your app needs, Firebase allows you to create your own security rules to allow read and write access to any file or group of files. We will see how to work with Firebase security rules for different use cases.
Capturing, uploading, listing, and deleting image files with Ionic is a typical task inside many applications. In this post, you will learn how to create an Ionic Angular app to handle both public and private images.
This app will work both inside the browser and as a native iOS and Android app. This is thanks to Ionic Capacitor because it provides APIs that work similarly across the different platforms!