Ionic Framework VS Apache Cordova

I was recently able to sit down with some of the core members of Ionic, who also created Stencil a toolchain for building Design Systems and Progressive Web Apps. We talked at great length how typically companies are approaching Ionic from a Design Team and need help building components. As a developer I wanted to talk about the Web Components that are used within the Design System first. There was a decent amount of surprise, so I thought I would break down what a Design System is and why it doesn't matter which end you start with, as long as you have both your Design and Development teams working together to build your Design System.

Look into Ionic Framework https://ionicframework.com/ or Cordova. They might be overkill for what you’re trying to do, but they allow you to create cross-platform apps via html/css/js.

Ionic Framework UI Components are used to build a website and then a mobile application is built using Ionic Capacitor. Ionic UI components are not required but are used for UX. The vue js code presented here will work fine in a separate application.

Welcome to Part Two of this four-part series on building a mobile game using open source technologies. We'll be using Phaser, along with Ionic, Capacitor, and Vue.

Turns out, it's easier than I expected! Thanks to Phaser, along with Ionic, Capacitor, and Vue, I was able to get a mobile game up and running on an iOS device working only a few hours here and there over two weeks.

Ionic Vue tabs navigation when using with child views inside of tabs is broken. The problem is that navigation(routing) using the tabs should be non-linear, but Ionic Vue has an issue with preserving the history track for each of the tabs. The issue is described there. Is there a way to make a non-linear routing stack in Ionic Vue?

Anyone have experience with/opinions on Apache Cordova? [1]

It seems like it would solve most of the PWA issues. Although I vaguely recall reading that Apple is not too fond of apps that are basically just wrapped web views.

[1] https://cordova.apache.org/

Has anyone tried pwa builder?[2]

Thank you for any insights!

[0]https://cordova.apache.org/

A little over a decade ago, I worked on the open-source project Apache Cordova/Adobe PhoneGap, first at IBM and later at Adobe. Apache Cordova enables you to build mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript while targeting multiple platforms with one code base. In today’s technology landscape, mobile is dominated by iOS and Android. In the early 2010’s we were awash in mobile platforms from BlackBerry, Microsoft, Firefox, Tizen, etc. Targeting multiple platforms, including the web, from one codebase was a game changer for overworked development teams.

There are layers that offer access to native APIs like capacitor, cordova and nativescript. Apparently sometimes multiple of them should be used, but I didn't understand what are the differences even after reading the announcement. These seem to be frontend agnostic technologies and Capacitor is apparently the more modern choice at the moment.

To be honest, we have not only Capacitor but also Cordova which Capacitor is based on but because Capacitor is more popular, has better community, deals with some problems better, and works beautifully with Ionic Framework I will tell more in a second, I simply recommend Capacitor.

Apache Cordova is an example of this. It is also useful if you need to access native code (the camera, database, etc), or to use just as a WebView Container as an application to deploy to the Play store/ App Store

I've had a lot of success with Vue + Cordova. https://cordova.apache.org/

Ratchet, Ionic, Cordova.