Ionic focuses on the frontend UX and UI interaction of an app — UI controls, interactions, gestures, animations. It's easy to learn, and integrates with other libraries or frameworks, such as Angular, React, or Vue. Alternatively, it can be used standalone without any frontend framework using a simple script include. If you’d like to learn more about Ionic before diving in, we created a video to walk you through the basics.
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.
Android offers a variety of ways to present content to a user. To provide a user experience that’s consistent with the rest of the platform, it’s usually best to build a native app that incorporates framework-provided experiences, such as Android App Links or Search. Additionally, you can use Google Play-based experiences, such as App Actions and Slices, where Google Play services is available. Some apps, however, may need increased control over the UI. In this case, a WebView is a good option for displaying trusted first-party content.
Figure 1 illustrates how you can provide access to your web pages from either a browser or your own Android app. The WebView framework allows you to specify viewport and style properties that make your web pages appear at the proper size and scale on all screen configurations for all major web browsers. You can even define an interface between your Android app and your web pages that allows JavaScript in the web pages to call upon APIs in your app—providing Android APIs to your web-based application.
