The Ionic Blog

Appflow: not just another CI/CD Service

Every production mobile app ultimately has a set of recurring tasks around integration, testing, deployment, and long term maintenance. These tasks often must be automated across a team of many developers and app projects. Building a process for these tasks can be incredibly time consuming and require specialized infrastructure experience, but is critical for the success of any serious app project.

Thankfully, teams don’t need to build solutions to these problems themselves, as there are services out there that can help. One such service works directly with your Cordova or Capacitor app to help your team easily perform these tasks. That means consistent builds, deploys on every commit, pushing remote app updates in realtime, and automating app store deployment as part of your mobile CI/CD workflow.

That service is Appflow, and it’s Ionic’s official Mobile DevOps platform. Appflow automates the whole DevOps side of your mobile app project, and is used to power significant apps and development teams across AAA, Burger King/Popeyes, Shipt, and more.

Let’s explore what a Mobile DevOps platform like Appflow is, what Appflow offers, how it differs from traditional CI/CD platforms, and how it’s being used today.

Ionic Appflow: Now Integrated with GitLab

Today I’m excited to announce the addition of GitLab integration with Ionic Appflow. Now you can easily connect your GitLab code repositories to Appflow to manage native app builds, deploy to app stores, and update your apps over time.

Haven’t used Appflow before? It’s a mobile DevOps solution that makes it easy to continuously build, deploy, and update mobile app experiences across iOS, Android, and the web. With Appflow, you can fully automate your team’s app development workflow, and go from idea to production.

Appflow works directly with Git version control, using your codebase as the source of truth for all available services, including the Live Update feature (update the UI and business logic of your app remotely in real-time) and Package feature (building native app binaries for iOS and Android in the cloud). Simply link your Git host then push a new code commit to start building in the cloud.

Announcing your Ioniconf Speakers Part 3

Well we’re in the final countdown to Ioniconf (queue that famous riff)! With our previous blog post here and here, we highlight some of speakers at the conference. Well we’re here to wrap everything up with the last batch of speakers for the conference. Let’s jump in!

Remember, we’ll be using Twitter to gather question during the conference, so as talks are going on, use the hashtag #askioniconf to ask your questions.

Announcing your Ioniconf Speakers Part 2

Last week, we announced our entire lineup of speakers at Ioniconf. In addition to that, we also highlighted 4 of our speakers. Well I’m back again to talk about 4 more of our speakers. These are people who I’ve gotten to know over the years and each of them bring a ton of experience to the table. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have them speaking at Ioniconf.

Announcing your Ioniconf Speakers

When we announced Ioniconf a few weeks ago, we were thrilled to see the response and sign-ups from all of our community members. I mean, we didn’t even say who was speaking at the event, so thanks for being so enthusiastic! But now we’re ready to share who is speaking at Ioniconf…so without further ado…here are your speakers!

We’ve brought together speakers from various different technology backgrounds and experiences to share insights not only on Ionic, but the Web Platform as a whole. The range of topics include, the latest in testing and static hosting, how to ship a product, and so much more. Not only do the Ioniconf speakers represent a broad cross-section of the tech landscape, they also bring a diverse set of viewpoints and perspectives. We’re thrilled that they’ve all agreed to present at Ioniconf and we hope that you are excited to learn from them as well.

We’ll be using Twitter to gather questions during the conference, so as talks are going on, use the hashtag #askioniconf to ask your questions.

I wanted to take a moment and highlight a few speakers whose talks I think will really stand out during the conference.

Managing Deep Links with URLgenius

The following is a guest post from our friends over at URLgenius, a cloud-based service for helping apps manage deep links to other apps. The post covers why you might want to consider URLgenius for your app, providing a great real-world example for how they’ve helped From Seed to Spoon provide a great user experience.

When it comes to app deep linking, we tend to think first of the technologies that we as developers are tasked with evaluating and implementing – things like Apple universal links, Firebase, standalone SDKs, etc. But what about cases where we need to link into 3^rd party apps that you have no control over? For example, linking into social apps like Facebook or Instagram, or into e-commerce apps like Amazon. From Seed to Spoon, an app built with Ionic, was in a similar situation and used URLgenius to solve their problems. Let’s dive into the situation.

Announcing Ioniconf 2020

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 #askioniconf

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 vs. Xamarin

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.

Announcing Identity Vault 4.0

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.

Keyboard improvements for Ionic Apps

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.