September 2016 Summaries

The announcement of the Ionic 2 Release Candidate marks a significant milestone with major performance improvements and new features, including updates to Angular 2 Final and the introduction of the Ahead of Time (AoT) compiler for faster app performance. The release also introduces a new build process using Rollup, which optimizes code execution and reduces bundle size through tree-shaking, moving away from a Gulp-based workflow to NPM scripts inspired by Create-React-App. The updated app structure, informed by the finalized APIs of Ionic and Angular, recommends a new directory structure but remains flexible for customization. As the API has solidified, the Ionic team encourages the community to test the framework and report any issues, paving the way for the final release of Ionic 2.0.

In a recent webinar titled "Building Mobile Apps With Performance and Speed," hosted by Ionic in collaboration with Neumob, experts Alex Muramoto and Tom Catterall delved into the state of hybrid app development, offering insights into best practices for designing apps under challenging mobile network conditions and discussing tools available in 2016 to enhance app performance. The session featured two parts: Alex Muramoto's "Building Performant Hybrid Apps" and Tom Catterall's "A Crash Course in Networking for Mobile," followed by an attendee Q&A session. The webinar aimed to equip developers with knowledge to create competitive mobile applications, and attendees were encouraged to join Ionic's newsletter for more updates and insights.

Wavve is a dynamic engagement platform developed with the Ionic framework, enabling listeners of audio content to interact with shows via short voice clips, creating a community-driven experience akin to a verbal message board enhanced with marketing tools. Launched by co-founder and CTO Nick Fogle, who transitioned from a legal career to tech, Wavve provides broadcasters with innovative ways to engage audiences, improve content marketing, and boost sponsorship sales, with early adopters including iHeartRadio and ESPN Radio. The platform supports both iOS and Android apps, using custom Cordova plugins to optimize audio file sizes, and has recently expanded to include a web app built on Angular, leveraging service workers for in-browser recording and compression. As Wavve seeks investment partners and plans a transition to Ionic 2, they continue to enhance their offerings by developing a progressive web app, aiming to attract more content creators across various media channels.

In a competitive app market, gaining visibility is crucial, and one effective strategy is to garner positive user ratings and reviews. The Ionic Native framework offers a tool called the App Rate plugin, which simplifies the process of prompting users to rate and review apps. By integrating this plugin into a mobile app, developers can easily ask users for feedback, which in turn can improve app rankings in store searches and encourage more downloads. The configuration of the App Rate plugin involves setting parameters like the number of uses before prompting and customizing the dialog text, ensuring that requests for ratings occur at moments when users are likely to have a positive experience. Proper implementation includes using the plugin in a way that minimally interrupts the user, such as after completing a satisfactory task, to maximize the likelihood of receiving positive feedback. The article provides a detailed guide on setting up and using this plugin within an Ionic project, emphasizing strategic timing for prompting user reviews to enhance the app's success.

Ionic announced its support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in both Ionic 1 and Ionic 2, emphasizing the ease of creating PWAs with built-in features like manifests and service workers. This development allows users to build apps that offer an app-like experience via a URL without needing app store downloads. Ionic now provides a default manifest in new apps to handle app metadata, while a minimal service worker script is included to facilitate offline capabilities and other network functionalities. Users are encouraged to customize their service workers to enhance functionality, with Ionic planning future improvements such as server-side rendering and automatic service worker configuration to further streamline PWA development. The announcement reflects Ionic's commitment to supporting modern web technologies and enhancing user experience by integrating PWA features directly into its framework.

Service workers are a vital yet often misunderstood component of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), providing crucial functionality such as offline capabilities, push notifications, and background sync, which contribute to delivering an app-like experience on the web. They operate independently of web applications, allowing continued functionality even when the app is closed, and offer programmatic caching control that surpasses the limitations of the older App-Cache API. Currently supported by major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, service workers are also being integrated into Ionic 2, promising easy enablement in Ionic apps. By enabling features such as pre-caching and read-through caching, service workers allow developers to customize offline experiences tailored to specific app functionalities. They also facilitate background sync, enabling actions to be deferred until internet connectivity is restored, and web push notifications, which have been a long-missing feature on the web, further enhancing user engagement. With ongoing advancements, the future of service workers in the Ionic ecosystem looks promising, aiming to simplify their integration and maximize their potential in creating network-independent applications.

In 2016, Apple mandated that all apps support IPv6, a move driven by the need to address IPv4's limitation of approximately four billion unique addresses, which is insufficient for the rapidly expanding internet. IPv6, with its 128-bit addressing, significantly expands this capacity, enabling trillions of unique addresses and allowing endpoints to auto-configure, thereby offering greater flexibility. For developers, this transition primarily requires ensuring that their apps function in IPv6-only environments, with a particular focus on avoiding hard-coded IP addresses and ensuring that hosting providers support IPv6. While initially challenging, this proactive switch by Apple is seen as a necessary step towards future-proofing internet infrastructure.

AWS Device Farm offers a robust solution for testing Ionic apps on a wide array of real Android and iOS devices in the AWS Cloud, ensuring a consistent user experience across different hardware, operating systems, and screen resolutions. By leveraging Device Farm, developers can interactively test their applications in real-time through a browser, upload their app packages (.apk for Android and .ipa for iOS), and conduct automated tests using popular frameworks such as Appium, Calabash, and XCTest. The platform supports parallel test execution on hundreds of devices, providing comprehensive reports that include screenshots, video recordings, and device logs, which help identify and resolve potential issues before app release. Developers can also integrate Device Farm into their existing workflows using plugins and SDKs, with the added benefit of 250 free device minutes to start.

Neumob is an app acceleration solution designed to improve mobile app load times and performance by up to 300%, catering to app owners focused on enhancing user experience. By integrating a simple two-line SDK into their apps, developers can optimize wireless traffic and maximize revenue, particularly benefiting sectors like financial trading, travel, and media where speed is crucial. Neumob employs the Ionic framework for its consumer-focused VPN app, Neumob – Internet Booster, which leverages Ionic's hybrid app capabilities to ensure efficient development across multiple platforms, including Android and iOS. Senior Software Engineer Young Park highlights the advantages of using Ionic, such as its compatibility with HTML technology, the ease of using Cordova plugins for native API access, and the ability to produce high-functioning apps swiftly. Park emphasizes the evolution of hybrid apps in matching the performance of native apps, noting Ionic 2's use of TypeScript and AngularJS 2 for enhanced performance and error reduction, and suggests that hybrid apps can extend beyond mobile to desktop and web applications, exemplified by the use of Ionic with electronJS for desktop app development.

In response to changes in Google's OAuth policy, which will block OAuth requests through the InAppBrowser plugin starting October 20, 2016, developers are encouraged to use the Google Sign-in Plugin with Ionic Native for a more secure and improved sign-in experience. The transition involves setting up a Google Developer account, obtaining necessary credentials, and installing the appropriate plugin from GitHub. The article provides a brief guide on implementing this setup in Ionic apps, offering code snippets to facilitate user authentication through Google. While most instructions focus on Ionic 2, the guide assures developers using Ionic 1 that similar implementations can be achieved with minor adjustments. Despite the initial perception of the policy change as challenging, the transition is presented as straightforward, with minimal code adjustments required, and support for this change is also being integrated into Ionic Cloud’s Auth features.