Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Normal people don’t know the difference and even experienced people can be fooled.

Anecdote: I have an Ionic app that is used by 15,000 people daily. It looks like a native app. Nobody ever wrote me an email that the app is not native, not fast enough or anything else. Normal people want to get their shit done and move on.

Heck, one user apparently was a dev and came up with a suggestion (enable keyboard suggestions for text input fields) and he wrote me specifically which iOS UI element I should choose over some other element he thought I was using. I replied: thanks, but this is an Ionic app, it doesn’t use native iOS elements ;)

Native apps are totally overrated imho, unless you make heavy use of fine-grained input controls. Here, Ionic does have its limits. You can’t control the keyboard properly for example, unless you wire in some Cordova plugins.

Oh and JS doesn’t run in the background. This can cause issues if you do a lot of background processing.

But performance is not much of an issue anymore in 2018 and Ionic is the most polished web-based framework that is tough to distinguish from native apps.

(Ionic CEO here) Thanks for the response and sharing your experience. I also have not heard any feedback that iOS users find Ionic's iOS styles jarring. Ionic is also meant to be customized and branded quite a bit, so stock native style isn't really what we're after anyways.

A priority for us in 2019 is making keyboard and background processing easier!

I phrased that poorly. I personally liked the look of Ionic. I read Medium post after Medium post while researching telling me I'm crazy to use Ionic since iOS people pay for apps and demand native appearance.

Interesting, well considering even a side menu isn’t official Apple UI that might be a case of native engineers projecting their own opinions on developers. Hard to say

Interesting. I haven’t written more than 5 lines of custom CSS. Besides changing the primary color, it’s all Ionic stock styles.

Just curious, what app is this? I’ve generally been of the opinion that it’s very hard to make native-looking Ionic apps.

Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app.

I won’t post my app here, since this leads to opinionated discussions that serve no purpose. You will always find something that looks off (but you can find off-looking things also in pure native apps).

So to turn the question back to you: what bothers you and what makes it hard to have native-looking apps?

> Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app.

I took a look at this again today, using a demo I found online: http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/, which I converted to a web app by adding it to my homescreen. Please let me know if this isn't representative of the current state of Ionic development. Here's just a few of the things that seemed broken/were wrong:

* I can't scroll to the top by tapping the top of the screen.

* The appearance and behavior of the search bar is incorrect.

* The size of the segmented control in the navigation bar is incorrect.

* Scrolling the menu frequently breaks completely–as in, I can't scroll at all. This also happens in the "Filter sessions" page.

* Swiping on switches doesn't match the system behavior: I should not be able to move it until I lift my finger. The animation that changes the switches from "wide" to "circular" isn't correct either.

* I broke the scrollbar insets on the support page.

* I can scroll the navigation bar out of the viewport.

* The background color for pickers is wrong.

* The location from where a backwards swipe can begin is wrong.

* The touch target on bar buttons is too small.

* There is no vibrancy at all.

And from a stylistic point of view:

* Floating action buttons are for Android, not iOS.

* Hamburger menus that duplicate the function of the tab bar are frowned upon.

* Table view selection isn't correct–it deselects itself too quickly.

* Buttons should be render before the view loads, not after.

That is a demo app that is not representative of what you can do with Ionic. As the README on Github says "This is purely a demo of Ionic with TypeScript. It is still in development."

Maybe you should/could report these at https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-conference-app/issues...

Thanks for taking the time to analyze the conference app. In contrast to my sibling poster, I actually think the Ionic demo conference app is what you get if you use Ionic. Sure, some stuff you can achieve with plugins (such as vibrancy), but overall, this is the styling you get if you start to develop an Ionic app now. IMHO, the point of Ionic is that you get a good UI toolkit built with web-technologies that don't require further customization.

However: I'm sure you're right with all of the things you listed. If you go back to the original question, it was: "Do normal people notice?" And my point is still: Normal people won't notice. You listed small details, half of them I don't even notice (search bar, scroll to top, switches, size of segment control, background color of a picker). For some things, you surely have a point and if your users insist on the last 5% of polish for that stuff, go ahead, do everything natively.

But if you see the conference app, the list views, the switches, the segment buttons and say: Well, it might not be at 100%, but surely at 90-95%, and this is good enough for me and my users, then I'd urge anyone to check out Ionic. Because going native obviously comes with a huge cost and the benefits of a Cordova-based app might outweight these details. Obviously, this again boils down to the fruitless discussion of "does dev experience matter or should only the user experience matter". This, you can only answer yourself.

I'm a solo-dev running a business and I can clearly answer this question with: Dev experience matters to me and my users don't give a shit about these kind of details, at least not enough to NOT use my app. I can even say: I have enough users. If some don't use my app because of small UI details, so be it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com