Why Developers Love Ionic: The Leading Mobile App Development Solution

Ionic powers a significant portion of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, driven entirely by the love that developers have for mobile app development on our platform.


We’re thrilled that Ionic continues to be used to power some of the most widely used consumer and enterprise mobile apps

Developers from startups up to the largest companies in the world continue to choose Ionic's mobile app development solution to build their entire development strategy.

What are some reasons why Ionic is so good for app development and why teams and developers are investing in Ionic and going hybrid?

prismic image

Ionic is web-first

Ionic's mobile app development solution is a collection of UI components and native APIs that enable web developers to build iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with one shared codebase and built on modern web standards.

For developers familiar with web development rather than native mobile app development, Ionic offers a familiar, cutting edge web development experience using modern JavaScript and TypeScript, advanced web APIs such as web components, and deep integration with Progressive Web App APIs such as Service Workers. It’s quite literally the modern web platform extended for native mobile app store apps.

Ionic is an industry leader in innovative web technology and Ionic developers directly benefit through increasingly better performance, access to new APIs, and powerful new tooling.

And, because Ionic is based on the web platform, it gives teams a key superpower: the ability to update their app in realtime and remotely (through Ionic Appflow).

So, developers that love web development love Ionic!

Ionic can do anything

Don’t believe the FUD. Apps built with Ionic's mobile app development solution can access every single native API on each platform, and are capable of doing anything a traditional native app can do (because they are native apps).

Ionic’s collection of over one hundred native API integrations and the ability to quickly extend your app to access any Native API or SDK give developers the ability to create the full experiences they need to.

In many cases, using these APIs is orders of magnitude easier than writing the native code to do it, so Ionic developers can add powerful native functionality to their apps really quickly and easily.

And if there isn't a ready-made solution, Ionic apps can easily be extended with custom native code so you're guaranteed to never get stuck implementing a must-have feature.

Ionic is open source and free to use

The Ionic App Platform is built on the open source Ionic Framework, a collection of UI controls that enable web developers to build iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Ionic Framework is MIT licensed and 100% free to use. 

Today, Ionic is one of the top 100 most starred repositories on GitHub and receives hundreds of community contributions each year.

Ionic is highly productive

Ionic is “write once run anywhere” that actually works. Not only does it dramatically cut down on the time it takes to target your audience, it’s also likely much faster than building one traditional native app!

With JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and over one hundred extensible and well-designed components, Ionic's mobile app development solution just plain makes it faster to get to a functional app than almost any other approach.

For teams trying to hit an impossible deadline, Ionic has been known to do the impossible and get an app to market ahead of time, even when competing with other cross-platform technologies.

For teams trying to build their risky new project or company and gain traction, Ionic is a superpower that enables startups to reach the broadest audience on day one (across iOS, Android, and web), and rapidly iterate thereafter.

Ionic is optimized to be highly practical and just make damn good business sense. No one does this better than Ionic.

Ionic works with your app development framework

Ionic Framework has deep integration with popular app development frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue. Each framework integration provides a first-class experience that developers familiar with that framework will love.

Ionic apps represent a significant portion of the apps built on Angular and we expect the same for React (released October, 2019) and Vue (in beta) given a similar amount of time.

On top of that, Ionic is built on a collection of framework-agnostic components, so developers using any of Ionic’s supported app development frameworks get updates at the same time, and are building literally on the same lower-level foundation so there’s no worry of divergence.

Ionic turns developers into good designers

Developers like Ionic's mobile app development solution because it gives them a much stronger design foundation than what Apple and Google provide out of the box.

Developers don’t want to just build stock-looking apps. They want to easily brand them, use patterns like Cards in popular use, and easily build animations and gesture-driven UI experiences. And, most of all, they want the initial design to look great out of the box.

Ionic is well known for doing just that. Developers tell us they love Ionic because it makes them look like good designers without much work at all.

Ionic is widely used

Getting to over 10% of the Apple App Store and 16% of the Google Play Store wasn’t an accident! Web developers have adopted Ionic in large numbers, everywhere from startups to the largest enterprise companies in the world.

Many enterprises have made Ionic a cornerstone of their app development strategy. They come to Ionic hoping to standardize on one technology that they can use in multiple places, and they want to use their existing web development skills to do it. They also feel much more confident about hiring web developers to join their teams than native mobile developers.

Indies come to Ionic to get to market considerably faster, benefit from compelling design defaults, reduce risk, and share code with their web properties. 

Until you’ve built one app and deployed it to over three platforms (iOS, Android, and web) at the same time, “write once run anywhere” can feel like too good to be true. But that’s the reality of millions of Ionic developers and a key reason that Ionic has become so popular.

Ionic is enterprise ready

Ionic isn’t just a community-supported open source framework or a big company’s side project. It’s a real and fast-growing business. In a market filled with projects that keep users at an arm’s length, Ionic’s entire business is helping teams build awesome mobile apps on the Ionic platform.

Today, Ionic has thousands of customers and a dedicated enterprise support and product team. Teams and companies are building using the enterprise version of Ionic Framework, Ionic’s suite of powerful security-oriented Native solutions and plugins, Ionic’s AppFlow DevOps platform for real-time updates and deploying directly to app stores, and Ionic’s expert support and services. 

Teams can get access to priority Support tickets with SLAs, access to bug and security hotfixes to production Ionic software, and expert help from the team directly behind Ionic’s popular open source projects.

Ionic is venture-backed and has raised over $18M, on top of having a rapidly growing revenue and customer base.

Ionic is already the foundation of the mobile strategy at many Fortune 1000 companies, and is in business to help these customers directly.

Ionic is the #1 mobile app development platform

Ionic continues to be a staple of the mobile app development ecosystem, driven by its intense focus on productivity and practicality. Ionic works on the broadest number of devices and platforms, utilizing the most widely used and understood technologies in the world, and is the most efficient and affordable path to getting an app to market.

Developers love Ionic's mobile app development solution because it uses modern web development techniques, enables them to get to quality design without needing strong design skills, is highly productive, and works with the web development tools they already use.

Enterprises love Ionic because they can get expert help directly from the team building the technology, access to security-oriented add-ons they can trust, benefit from key DevOps capabilities such as remote updating, and the ability to easily hire and train new developers on the technology.

If any of the above resonates with you or your team, we hope you'll give Ionic a try. Feel free to reach out to a Solutions Architect and we will be happy to give you an honest answer as to whether Ionic is a fit for your team.

About Ionic

Ionic is the leading cross-platform developer solution with 5 million developers worldwide. It powers 15% of apps in the app store, not including thousands of apps built internally at enterprises for every line-of-business need. Ionic is unique in that it takes a web-first approach, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build high-quality iOS, Android, desktop, and Progressive Web Apps.

Ionic is a leader in enterprise app development. Thousands of enterprise customers use Ionic to build mission-critical apps for their customers, both external and internal.


You’re in good company. Ionic powers millions of apps at some of the smartest companies in the world.

See all Customers →
Community Forum →

Stop by and say hello. The Forum is the best place to connect, ask a question, or help out other Ionic developers!

Explore the docs →

Take a look and get coding! Our documentation covers all you need to know to get an app up and running in minutes.