Foreword
In 2013, our small team was then one year into working on drag-and-drop developer tools for the two most popular mobile and desktop web frameworks at the time: jQuery Mobile and Bootstrap. We saw the rapid rise of reusable components and frameworks for web development, and we were working hard to make it easier to use them through better and more inclusive tooling.
Around this time, the iPhone 5 came out, followed shortly by iOS 7, with dramatically faster web performance and new web APIs that unlocked previously inaccessible performance and features for mobile browser apps. We wondered: could a web framework be built that took advantage of this new performance to provide a native-like UI kit for web developers to build native-quality apps with standard browser technologies? A “Bootstrap for mobile,” if you will?
Coincidently, Angular 1 was seeing incredible adoption in the broader web development space and seemed to provide a perfect answer for reusable JavaScript and HTML components for the web. We decided to try our hand at building a mobile-first web UI framework, using the fast-growing Angular 1 framework to make it interactive and distributable.
The first release of Ionic, at the end of 2013, was met with excitement from web developers, and the project quickly accumulated stars on GitHub and installs on NPM. Over the next year and a half, the project saw over one million apps built by startups, dev shops, and enterprise users alike.
Then in 2015, JavaScript seemingly ...