Building mobile apps with HTML/JS
Hi folks,
I am looking to build a quick mobile app with primarily web tech (HTML/JS etc).
I have been looking at Electron (electronjs.org) and Ionic Framework (ionicframework.com). Not sure if there are others worth looking into.
I would love to know if anyone has used these for prototype or in production?
Put another way: What's your approach to building a mobile app quickly without the overhead of maintaining separate OS specific codebases?
Thanks,
Luthfur
ionic is good. the annoying thing about it is that it moves very fast. I have built 2 apps and currently building a 3rd one. Annoying thing is they are all different versions, v2, v3 and v5. If you can code it gets the job done. Before it needed some knowledge of angular, but they now have it where if you also know react or vue you can use it, opening up to a wider audience. I just use it for simple apps, I'm not a designer, so if you want to have app with very unique display or something graphics heavy, it might not be what you need or it might take a lot of effort. I recommend it.
Thanks, yeah I am just looking to build some very simple apps. I'll try out ionic.
(Turns out electronjs is on available for desktop apps).
Any other tools/approach worth looking into?
I'd suggest you look into no-code platforms like Backendless. I know that as a developer it can seem like taking the easy road, but most no-code platforms can do 90+% what you could do with code and they let you do it much faster so you can get your MVP out there and start collecting feedback asap.
I recommend Backendless because it has both a frontend and backend builder (no need to source multiple services) and it automatically works cross-platform with iOS, Android, and web.