It’s finally happening! The moment that’s been talked about, questioned, speculated, humbly requested, not so humbly requested, and otherwise called for by many a community member …the first-ever Ionic conference.

You heard it right, folks. Announcing Ioniconf 2020!

Ioniconf 2020 is an all digital event taking place June 24th (t-minus 34 days and counting) from the comfort of your own home! We’ve brought together industry leaders to share everything they can about Ionic and the Web Platform, in a celebration of the web and web developers.

What you need to know

Let’s share some backstory here, because it’s been a wild ride getting this event up and running. Rewind back to my first ngConf in 2015. After the conference was over, a few of us on the Ionic team and some community members were celebrating a successful trip when one brought the idea of an Ionic conference. “Yeah, we’ll have the event in Vegas, I’ll help you all out in setting up the details, and it will be great. It will be something to celebrate this amazing community and bring in people who are experts in our industry to share their knowledge.”

Well, you know how it goes. Planning and executing a physical event is no easy – or cheap – endeavor. And as weeks turned to months, and months turned to years, we put off the idea until we were ready.

Well, given the current climate and the growing acceptance of (nay, clamoring for) virtual events, we decided that the time was indeed right. And now here we are.

And just like we originally envisioned, Ioniconf 2020 will be a celebration of the Ionic community. A fun-filled day focused on education, sharing, and enlightenment in the ways of the web.

The format is a one day, single track, online conference covering all things related to web development and Ionic. Attendees can sit back and enjoy a full day of amazing talks, plus Q&A with speakers after sessions. We’ll be watching for questions from social media, so be sure to tag your questions with #AskIoniconf2020

Stay tuned for details about Ioniconf 2020 in the coming weeks as we add speakers, topics, and other exciting details. We are excited to put this event on and we hope you’ll join us!

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Ionic and Xamarin are two of the most popular options for mobile app development. Both endeavor to make app development faster, easier, and more accessible to a wider audience of developers. The key contrast between them lies in the ecosystems that they embrace.

Ionic is a platform that uses widely-known, standards-based web technologies and languages to create award-winning mobile experiences, and is built on the broader web and JavaScript ecosystem. Xamarin is a Microsoft product and embraces the Microsoft ecosystem.

The choice between Ionic and Xamarin depends a lot on which approach and community you are willing to bet on. Even if you’re an existing C# or .NET developer, your options are vast. In fact, there’s never been a better time to switch to the web.

Note: Check out our just-published Ionic vs. Xamarin comparison guide for a more comprehensive analysis.

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Today I’m excited to announce Ionic Identity Vault 4.0, the latest release from our suite of pre-built mobile solutions. Identity Vault makes it easy to add secure biometric authentication to your Ionic apps in minutes, using the latest in native security best practices.

This latest release of Identity Vault offers enhanced Android support by adding Android 10 (SDK 29) and AndroidX support. With this addition, Face Unlock and Iris Unlock are now available.

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Let’s face it: the keyboard is a constant source of pain and frustration for users and developers. Much of this has to do with the limited control browsers provide with keyboards. For native apps, we’ve even gone as far as creating plugins to help ease the pain of keyboards. Thankfully, browser vendors have agreed that the keyboard experience on the web is less than ideal and have decided to do something about it. In this blog post, we’ll look at some new APIs available on the web and discuss how we’re using them in Ionic to help developers.

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We’ve just published a new Appflow guide covering how to transfer your PhoneGap Build-based application to Ionic Appflow. Check it out here.

The past few years have seen the rise of build-in-the-cloud services. Why? To put it mildly, not everyone enjoys setting up and maintaining build systems to compile their native mobile applications. As just one example, you must have access to a Mac in order to compile a native iOS application. This, and plenty of other challenges, have led to offerings such as Adobe’s PhoneGap Build.

While it is currently still up and running, it is not getting a lot of attention from Adobe. This is problematic in today’s ever-evolving mobile landscape as developers try to keep up with a barrage of security fixes, new mobile operating system updates, and more.

So, as part of their broad strategy to provide a full spectrum of solutions to web developers building cross-platform apps, Ionic created its own cloud build service, Appflow.

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Few business or IT leaders would argue that mobile is no longer optional. This reality has never been more true as we navigate a global pandemic that’s changing almost everything about how we go about living our daily lives. Companies, employees, families, and just about everyone is #AloneTogether, making mobile not just a nice-to-have, but the principal method of communicating, be it with loved ones or employees.

While the case for mobile apps is airtight, an existing shortage of developer talent has hindered companies’ ability to push out the apps their employees need and their customers want in a timely and non-complex manner. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2021, market demand for app development will grow at least five times faster than IT’s capacity to deliver it. That’s a striking number.

The question is: with mobile more important than ever, how can enterprise teams meet demand?

Today we are pleased to launch our State of Enterprise Mobile App Development research report, which surveyed more than 1,700 professional developers, architects, and IT leaders to find out what’s happening in enterprise app development today. The research report was conducted in tandem with our 3rd annual Ionic Developer Survey, released last week.

The results uncover significant information organizations need to catalyze change, including the fact that supply and demand are out of sync and enterprise teams are facing a growing app backlog.

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A few weeks ago, we shared how the Ionic community is tackling the COVID-19 crisis by building apps to help inform the public.

The efforts are incredibly inspiring – while COVID has upended normal life and forced us inside, that doesn’t mean that the community’s desire to connect with other members or learn new skills has stopped. Quite the opposite, in fact.

During the early days of Ionic, hosting meetups was a great way to connect with local community members, improve your web development skills, and keep up to date with the latest in Ionic tech. So, to help facilitate our community learning and growing together, we’re putting renewed effort into making Ionic Meetups easy and fun again.

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Today I’m thrilled to announce the 2.0 release of Capacitor, Ionic’s native runtime that makes it easy to build web apps that run on iOS, Android, and on the web as Progressive Web Apps— all powered by a single codebase.

Developers use Capacitor as a native app container for packaging and deploying their Ionic apps to various mobile and desktop platforms. Capacitor allows them to access native features like the Camera using the same code across all platforms – without having to worry about platform-specific details.

This new version updates Capacitor and its project templates to the latest security, bug fixes, and features including:

• Swift 5 and Xcode 11+ support
• Android 10 (SDK 29) and AndroidX support, which makes Face Unlock and Iris Unlock available now in Ionic Identity Vault.
• Bug fixes and usability improvements to 23+ core plugins

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This is a guest post from Simon Grimm, Ionic Developer Expert and educator at the Ionic Academy. Simon also writes about Ionic frequently on his blog Devdactic.

Introduced a while ago, Sign in with Apple makes it easy for users to sign in to your apps and websites using their Apple ID. As of April 2020, this feature is required if you use any sort of 3rd party or social login on iOS (some exclusions apply). This includes Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login.

The flow of this authentication process is mostly the same as with any other OAuth provider, which means it should be familiar, but it involves a lot of detailed configuration in different places.

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It seems that any time Apple releases something there is bound to be some noise regarding it. This time, it’s in regards to browser storage and Apple’s recent proclamation that such data will be deleted after 7 days. Well let’s break this down and see what this really means for developers.

Let me start by saying that these are only my opinions. These do not reflect the opinions of Ionic or the rest of my coworkers. In fact, there’s healthy disagreement and differing views among our team, as I’m sure there are on yours.

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