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.
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.
Today the Appflow team put the finishing touches on a brand new feature that we’ve been working on for almost a year.
It’s possibly the most anticipated Appflow feature since we first launched the product (originally called “Ionic Pro”) back in summer 2017, and the one we’re most excited about personally: the ability to publish directly to the Apple and Android app stores, right from Appflow.
As the world tries to make sense of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing social and economic crisis, developers in the Ionic community are leading the charge to inform and help the public.
In the last few weeks, we’ve been made aware of many efforts across the world by Ionic developers to build useful apps for mobile and web, and we want to take a second to share those.
Help A Neighbor is a Stencil app helping people find and connect with those in need
Parting thoughts
One thing that has become crystal clear in the last few weeks is just how crucial the open web and Progressive Web Apps have been to the developers building coronavirus apps. As Apple and Google notify developers of increased app store review times and seem to be blocking and even suspending most coronavirus apps, developers are turning to the web to share their apps with the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. I’m glad that Ionic is able to facilitate this Progressive Web App-first approach and many are taking advantage of it.
If I had to guess, one of the biggest changes that will come from this period in terms of app development will be the establishment and growth of Progressive Web Apps, as they seem to be the only way to get any kind of Coronavirus app to market right now.
From all of us at Ionic, we’re so proud of the time and effort the Ionic community is putting into the response and we promise you we will be standing by to help promote your work. You all make us feel like we’re doing something, however small, to get information and help to the world. You are truly what makes this community so special.
If you’re building something that was not mentioned here, please tweet @maxlynch and we will get this updated.
There’s no shortage of fantastic hosting providers these days. If you’re looking to deploy a web app, you really can’t pick wrong. But there are a few that stand out as being the best hosting solution for Progressive Web Apps. Today we’re going to look at how to deploy an Ionic React app to ZEIT and how simple ZEIT makes the whole process.
Today I’m thrilled to announce that Salesforce customers can now quickly and easily add Salesforce authentication to any Ionic app using Auth Connect.
Auth Connect is an Ionic solution that provides a simple, secure method of integrating with auth providers to enable single sign-on (SSO) within your Ionic apps.
The perils of rolling your own SSO
An often overlooked challenge of app development is implementing secure user authentication in your mobile experiences.
Not only is it time consuming to integrate with an existing auth provider, it’s also risky. Teams that don’t properly authenticate users or store user secrets safely will expose themselves to the risks of a data breach or violation of customer privacy.
For example, a common mistake made by teams that implement their own auth integration is to use the InAppBrowser plugin to display a web-based UI for user login. This puts the user at risk of a JavaScript injection or “man in the middle” attack, whereby a bad actor intercepts the communication and obtains the user’s credentials.
Out-of-date, insecure auth provider plugins are also sources of risk, along with poorly implemented OAuth integrations.
Long before joining Ionic, I built web-based apps (using jQuery and Knockout.js!) and deployed them to iOS and Android using Cordova. They weren’t pretty (I didn’t have something like this 😉 available), the code was messy, but they got the job done: I was a web developer building mobile apps using one codebase!
Despite my enthusiasm, I quickly ran into issues that would continue to haunt me over time.
Limited cross-platform deployment: I wanted to make my apps available on iOS, Android, and the web. Cordova’s focus on mobile, as well as limited browser APIs, made it challenging, if not impossible, to reach all platforms successfully.
Opaque native configuration: Builds would fail or features wouldn’t work as expected, and I struggled to solve them since I didn’t understand Cordova’s native project abstractions.
Stability: I dreaded updating the apps because native plugins would constantly break between new mobile OS versions or conflicting plugin versions.
So, Angular universal is a thing… And it seems it is something you all have been very excited about for some time. Since I tweeted about this some time ago, it’s been one of the top 3 most common questions asked of us (right behind “when’s Ionic Vue going to be ready”). Well I did promise that it would be happening soon and that there would indeed be a blog post, so let’s take care of that today!
Introducing the @ionic/angular-server module for Angular Universal!
We’re currently looking for Native iOS and Android engineers who are interested in building open source and commercial Native solutions for Ionic developers and customers. This would be an opportunity to build the foundation of a very popular and growing developer platform and work on lower-level functionality and features that developers will use to build wonderful apps.
The Ionic team today has a number of engineers with Native iOS and Android experience but we need more in order to achieve our lofty goals of building the most accessible and productive app development platform in the world.
I recently started a personal Ionic Insiders newsletter where I dive deep into Ionic related topics in a less formal setting (consider subscribing if you’re interested!)
One of my first posts is a deep dive into Capacitor, Ionic’s new Native API and Web View layer.
If you’re interested in the genesis and philosophy of the project, and want to know how Capacitor works at a low level, check out my essay below:
