Ionic is an open-source UI toolkit that empowers developers to build high-quality mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With integrations for popular frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue, Ionic offers a unique opportunity for developers to create cross-platform applications that run seamlessly on both iOS and Android devices.
Getting Started
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To begin building with Ionic, simply install the framework or follow our step-by-step guide to setting up your system. Alternatively, dive into the beautifully designed UI component library and start customizing your app's visual design to fit your brand.
Overview
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Ionic focuses on the frontend UX and UI interaction of an app, providing a robust set of UI controls, interactions, gestures, and animations. Its ease of use and flexibility make it an ideal choice for developers looking to create high-quality mobile apps without sacrificing performance.
One Codebase, Running Everywhere
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Ionic is the only mobile app stack that enables web developers to build apps for all major app stores and the mobile web from a single codebase. With Adaptive Styling, Ionic apps look and feel at home on every device, ensuring a seamless user experience across multiple platforms.
A Focus on Performance
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Ionic is built to perform and behave great on the latest mobile devices, with best practices like efficient hardware-accelerated transitions and touch-optimized gestures. This focus on performance ensures that your app runs smoothly and efficiently, providing an excellent user experience.
Clean, Simple, and Functional Design
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Ionic is designed to work and display beautifully on all current mobile devices and platforms. With ready-made components, typography, and a gorgeous (yet extensible) base theme, you'll be building in style.
Native and Web Optimized
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Ionic emulates native app UI guidelines and uses native SDKs, bringing the UI standards and device features of native apps together with the full power and flexibility of the open web. Ionic also uses Capacitor (or Cordova) to deploy natively or runs in the browser as a Progressive Web App.
Goals
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Cross-Platform: Build and deploy apps that work across multiple platforms, such as native iOS, Android, and the web as a Progressive Web App - all with one codebase.
Web Standards-Based: Ionic is built on top of reliable, standardized web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using modern Web APIs such as Custom Elements and Shadow DOM. This ensures that Ionic components have a stable API and aren't at the whim of a single platform vendor.
Beautiful Design: Clean, simple, and functional design that works and displays beautifully out-of-the-box across all platforms.
Simplicity: Built with simplicity in mind, creating apps is enjoyable, easy to learn, and accessible to just about anyone with web development skills.
Framework Compatibility
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While past releases of Ionic were tightly coupled to Angular, version 4.x of the framework was re-engineered to work as a standalone Web Component library, with integrations for popular JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue. This makes it easy to use Ionic with most frontend frameworks, including Angular, React, and Vue.
JavaScript
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One of the main goals with moving Ionic to Web Components was to remove any hard requirement on a single framework to host the components. This made it possible for the core components to work standalone in a web page with just a script tag.
Angular
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Ionic has always been at the center of what makes Ionic great, and Angular is no exception. The @ionic/angular package makes integration with the Angular ecosystem a breeze, providing all the functionality that Angular developers would expect coming from Ionic 2/3.
React
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Ionic now has official support for the popular React library. Ionic React lets React developers use their existing web skills to build apps that target iOS, Android, and the web.
Vue
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Ionic now has official support for the popular Vue 3 library. Ionic Vue lets Vue developers use their existing web skills to build apps that target iOS, Android, and the web.
Future Support
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Support for other frameworks will be considered in future releases.
Ionic CLI
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The official Ionic CLI is a tool that quickly scaffolds Ionic apps and provides a number of helpful commands to Ionic developers. In addition to installing and updating Ionic, the CLI comes with a built-in development server, build and debugging tools, and much more.
Appflow
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To help build, deploy, and manage Ionic apps throughout their lifecycle, we offer a commercial service for production apps called Appflow. This service is separate from the open-source framework and provides advanced features like cloud builds and deployments, single sign-on (SSO), and access to connected services and integrations.
With Appflow, developers can compile native app builds and deploy live code updates to Ionic apps from a centralized dashboard. Optional paid upgrades are available for more advanced capabilities.