Today I am excited to announce the release of Ionic 6.2. This release continues to enhance many of the features we introduced in Ionic 6.0 including datetime, the bottom sheet, and more.
This release includes features many developers have asked for, so let’s dive in!
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of Capacitor 4.0 🎉. This new major version brings not only a bunch of bug fixes and improvements to the overall codebase, but also bumps the minimum SDK targets to support new Google Play policies. For folks with existing apps, fear not, upgrading to Capacitor 4.0 is nothing like past releases. Given the rock solid base we created in v3, Capacitor 4.0 only requires a few changes to existing code.
Today, we’re rolling out a new feature to the Ionic Cloud CLI: Live Update channel deletion. Keep your live channel list maintainable as you roll out new features quickly over time.
The Cloud CLI provides the ability to use all of Ionic’s cloud products inside your own CI/CD platform (such as Azure DevOps, GitLab, Jenkins, and more). You can control exactly when builds are produced and deployed and insert your own processes in between these steps (such as code signing, QA testing, manager approvals, etc.).
At Ionic, we are always evaluating ways to improve our products. As a core feature of Appflow, our Mobile DevOps platform, native builds have continued to be something we revisit. While its build times were already quite fast, we felt we could do even better.
After a deep dive into our native builds process, we came out on the other side with some significant upgrades. Let’s take a look at how we achieved up to 50% faster build times in Appflow.
Ionic has been recognized as a high performer in continuous integration and continuous development categories, and leader in mobile development frameworks category in the summer quarter by G2—a peer-to-peer review site and software marketplace.
Mobile development frameworks grid
I’ve always found the Hybrid vs Native mobile debate a bit silly. Most native mobile apps mix Native UI controls and Web Views, including popular first-party apps built by Apple and Google. If this wasn’t such a common use case, the Web View component wouldn’t exist nor would it be so widely used. I often find myself asking: at what percentage of Native UI components and Web Views is an app considered native or not? That always seemed incredibly subjective to me.
Today we are thrilled to announce React Native support for Portals, our new SDK for building mobile apps that utilize a micro-frontend architecture to scale app development across teams in large organizations.
Portals makes it possible to embed micro-frontend web experiences into a single React Native app through a drop-in React Native component. A Portals component hosts a Web View but extends it with powerful functionality such as the ability to expose native functionality to each Web View in a controlled, safe manner, and best-practices around implementing the Web View lifecycle. Most importantly, each Portal can be updated remotely in real-time, so teams can ship bug fixes and new features in parallel and as soon as they’re ready.
With this, Portals for React Native allows React Native teams to:
Portals also supports traditional iOS and Android apps and hybrid apps, and can be used across a variety of mobile frameworks and technologies a team may be using. Portals is in production in a number of significant mobile apps built by large teams, helping them scale and ship faster.
This is a guest post from Simon Grimm, Ionic Developer Expert and educator at the Ionic Academy. Simon runs a YouTube channel where he helps web developers build awesome mobile apps based on their existing skills!
What happens when your app goes to the background? How do you react when your app is restored? These questions and more can be answered by adding the Capacitor App plugin to your app, which brings a handful of utility functions and listeners to your web native app!
In this tutorial we will explore all features of the plugin to control our state, catch events like the Android back button or restored app state, and finally even add a simple handler for a custom URL scheme to open our app!
Something I like to do is evaluate various Database services to see what the latest and greatest offerings are. One name that came up in my research was HarperDB. HarperDB is a distributed SQL/NoSQL database with a built-in HTTP API, that can be deployed anywhere from edge to cloud. To stretch my SQL-muscles a bit, I decided to check out HarperDB and see what it was all about. We’ll build a basic app that performs all the standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) and see what it’s like working with HarperDB.
The overwhelming majority of design systems that exist today are built for the web. While this is great for web developers, the web is not the only platform that people use. It doesn’t take a 10x developer to see that mobile apps are just as common as web applications. Yet, so many design systems seem to be built without the mobile experience in mind. In this tutorial, we’ll break out of this web centric mindset and see how we can build components that are suitable for the web and mobile. If you’re worried that we’ll have to use Swift or Java or Kotlin, fear not. We’re going to build cross platform components solely with web technologies using Stencil and Capacitor.