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In spring of this year Andréj and I were at the Spartakiade in Berlin. We heard a talk about Ionic, which was quite interesting. We are building an app for Android for Camping.Info by wrapping the web application in Cordova/PhoneGap, and wanted to see what alternative Ionic is offering.

With Ionic you can build Apps for your web applications as long as their frontends are build with HTML5, JS and CSS. Ionic is building on top of AngularJS, and will also be working with AngularJS 2. It replaces Angular directives to give the app more of a native feel. Ionic uses different layouts (for instance for tabs) according to the system the app is running on. One can customize the CSS styles. While developing the app, the preview is updating fast for immediate feedback. There is also an Ionic Creator online. Here is a talk at the ngconf of 2015.

We will probably try Ionic out. Alternatives to Ionic are Xamarin (comapartively expensive and Xamarin.Forms is said to be slow) and NativeScript (close to node.js).