Mobile App Development with Ionic 2, 1st Edition

Chapter 1. Hybrid Mobile Apps

Mobile application development is becoming one of the most important skills that a developer can possess. Over the past decade, we have seen an explosion of mobile devices—phones, tablets, and now wearables—that have given rise to a whole ecosystem of mobile applications. We are now living in an age of mobile apps. But learning how to create them is still a challenge. Typically, a developer will need to learn and master each platform’s specific development language: Objective-C or Swift if you are creating iOS-based applications, or Java if you are creating Android-based applications. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a solution that allowed for one shared language that we could use across multiple platforms? There is: by leveraging the shared language of the web and some incredible frameworks, developers can now develop their applications in one code base and deploy it to a wide range of mobile platforms. This is known as a hybrid mobile application, because it blends the native capabilities of the mobile device with the ability to develop using web technologies.

What exactly is a hybrid mobile application? Unlike traditional native mobile apps that are built using the device’s native development language. Hybrid apps are are built with web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) instead. In fact, you probably have more than one hybrid app installed on your mobile device right now.

The Ionic Framework is one of the most popular hybrid mobile application ...