Hacker News Reader

Comment by teucris | Hacker News Reader

So, essentially Phonegap/Cordova again? I always liked that model. I’m not entirely clear why it fell out of favor.

I spent the last 6 years building an Ionic app for “enterprise”. The still-not-native UX is the main reason why it’s not more popular, in my opinion.

In our case, our users had little say in their respective organizations’ decisions to buy our product, and “good enough” was still better than what our competitors were offering anyway.

We spent a lot of time of time debugging native layer issues, and WebGL bugs that would crash the webview (vector maps using the ArcGIS JS SDK) so it’s not a magic bullet in those respects either.

I agree 100%. Ionic's default UI is aweful; it makes me so sad.

I reckon there is space for a drop in replacement ui for Angular and Ionic that respects screen real estate and users ability to interep a more dense set of information. Less padding etc. I'd pay for it. Or there could just be a few small modifications to make what is there more workable.

The worst part of this approach in my experience is that, at the end, you always feel like it's an optimization problem on your end.

It fell out of favour for one of the same reasons the author cites - that third party dependencies were a dumpster fire. I would say that as frustrating as this can be with React Native, Cordova was substantially worse.

I think people still use Ionic, which uses Cordova or Capacitor for native.

There are certainly use cases for it but also many downsides, it's mainly just hard to get the UI right.

Because the apps felt like utter dogshit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com