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Real-Time Hybrid Mobile App Development Using Ionic & Firebase Frameworks

Mobile devices are constantly growing in today’s virtual world, and mobile app development is an integral part of that. Nowadays, a huge number of applications are accessible on different operating systems. 

Since it has become a high-tech world, there is a demand for multi-platform applications and backend services. Thus, many tools are being created to facilitate this. Furthermore, developing hybrid mobile applications for multi-platforms saves app developers and businesses time. Therefore, it is quite beneficial for IT companies.

What is Ionic?

According to Ionic, open technology is the future and thus must be utilized to build effective mobile applications with best mobile app ideas. Ionic is a free and open-source that provides tools and components which help to build quickly, high-quality, and highly interactive apps. It is done through web technologies like HTML and JavaScript.

Ionic Framework can easily be picked and integrated with other Vue, Angular, and React frameworks.

UI components

Ionic’s UI components are excellent for all mobile devices and various platforms. You can even begin with pre-made components, a base theme, and typography that adapts well to all the platforms.

Write once, and run anywhere

Ionic lets app developer’s ship adaptive styling apps to the app stores. 

Developer-friendly tooling

Ionic provides extensive and detailed documentation, examples, and beginner-friendly videos to help developers learn quickly.

Statistics- Ionic is built to perform and sprint on every latest and updated mobile device. Ionic is a must-try for building fast apps as it has built-in best features.

  • Up to 60 FPS Scrolling on mobile devices as well as the desktop
  • 100 % performance score in Lighthouse PWA
  • Two times faster than the earlier versions

Ionic App’s Standard Architect:

  • Modules: Modules help organize an application through utilities and directives.  
  • Components: Components seem to be the building blocks of a UI. Components are the primary means by which elements and logic are created and defined on the page.
  • Templates: Templates are those elements that make up the component’s view. It’s similar to standard HTML. 
  • Services: Service includes any function or feature that the application requires. A service has a specific and well-defined function.
  • Assets: photos that the app locally needs.
  • External resources: Databases and other external resources are important because they facilitate the app to communicate with the world.

What makes Ionic Framework the Best for Developing Real-time Hybrid Apps?

Among the most popular real-time hybrid mobile application development, the Ionic Framework is considered the best by many people. Ionic serves as the basis for developing real-time hybrid mobile applications. 

A remarkable number of hybrid applications have been developed with the Ionic Framework’s help since it was released in 2013. 

AngularJS, SASS, and Apache Cordova are used to build the Ionic Framework. This helps create mobile applications with rich features based exclusively on web technologies. 

In addition, the Framework’s technologies provide numerous advantages to Ionic development teams. 

Selecting the appropriate and perfect technology framework will enable and help you to align your plans with the end-user’s needs. In addition, ionic application development helps businesses launch unique mobile applications on different platforms. These are a few advantages of using Ionic for real-time hybrid app development:

  • Open-source: Ionic ensures that the companies benefit from the low development cost.
  • Cross-Platform mobile app development: Ionic assists developers in code-reusability. This means companies and businesses can build apps on various platforms by using a single codebase.
  • In-demand Framework: This Framework ensures that companies won’t face any trouble finding developers who will assist them in carrying out their plans related to the app development.
  • Excellent community support: a wide and big community of active app developers. This means it’s easy for companies to deal with bugs and any other kinds of problems.

Hybrid mobile application frameworks have become popular, especially in the last few years. Rather than two separate codebases that are Objective-C/Swift for iOS and Java for Android phones, you can maintain one with hybrid frameworks. It is written generally as a web app that runs as a mobile app.

The Ionic Framework has thus become the prime hybrid app development framework, and its advantages include a chance to reuse the code between the mobile and web applications. This is possible because both are made using frontend languages.

Moreover, Ionic usually gives the same performance as native applications. This is especially true if you utilize the Ionic’s pre-built components. Local communities have tried it completely, and most bugs and problems have been fixed and solved. Thus, Ionic applications are recommended and suggested.

What is Firebase?

Firebase is an excellent platform that helps in building real-time applications. It removes and simplifies the need to write server-side code. It even assists in managing the server instances.

This service helps those frontend developers who want to make excellent and valuable apps without learning backend programming. Firebase alone is quite enough to incorporate numerous easy to medium use cases.

Firebase is a backend data system that provides real-time data syncing without writing any custom code. In addition, Firebase makes your backend development obsolete. Thus, it significantly reduces your multi-platform app development time.

Google Firebase Backend 

Utilizing real-time hybrid frameworks like Ionic will decrease the development time of the mobile application quite remarkably. However, we need to pay attention to the backend components that need to be created. 

Google Firebase explicitly focuses on the development of the mobile application. However, it can provide a cross-platform solution and give backend services to the entire infrastructure.

Firebase is a group of modules that provides various backend functionalities, as per your convenience and need. Moreover, all these functions can be executed with JavaScript. This means a similar group can be used to build the mobile application and code them.

These are some fundamentals of the key modules that you’ll probably require:

  • Authentication
  • Real-time database
  • Cloud functions
  • Cloud storage
  • Cloud messaging

Features and Benefits:

Data changes are provided to clients without any changes and modifications required in the backend code.

  • There are a variety of adapters that provide excellent support and documentation. In addition, there are adapters for all famous JavaScript frameworks and mobile platform SDKs.
  • There is an Ease of authentication. This means authentication in Firebase is a very easy process, as a single method call. Furthermore, it is true regardless of the method of authentication. It even assists and supports simple email, Google, Facebook, and Twitter-based logins.
  • It is Offline enabled. All Firebase data are offline-enabled. This ensures that the mobile application is almost fully functional even in disconnected mode. However, the applications automatically get synchronized when the connection gets restored.
  • There is a facility of Configuration dashboard. Much of Firebase, like security rules, can be very easily configured. It is possible through the intuitive dashboard interface of Firebase.
  • It is JSON-centric. This means all the data in Firebase is stored and retrieved in JSON form.
  • Firebase also provides cloud services. As a result, it can save significant deployment and maintenance time.

Another important point worth considering is that Google acquired Firebase recently. This has helped Firebase gain significant attention and recognition. 

Native device functionality

You can easily access native device functions and features with even a little bit of the idea of JavaScript. You even have the options to choose from an extensive library of around 120 native device plugins. 

This is useful for accessing Camera, location, Bluetooth, to name a few. You can even go for a full native SDK if needed. There are no restrictions and limitations to what and the way you can build.

Build with your preferred Tech

Ionic doesn’t make any assumptions about the preferred tech stacks of your team with which you choose to build. This makes Ionic integrate seamlessly with all the good frontend frameworks. These include Angular, React, Vue, etc. 

More than 5 million mobile app developers in over 200 countries worldwide are using Ionic and Firebase to power their app development. You must also join the numerous global meetups and different forums that make building and developing apps with Ionic and Firebase so much more exciting and fun.

Ionic and Firebase make building and developing cross-platform mobile apps quite enjoyable. Its integration seems quite simple, and thus it has become quite considerable for mobile app development. Thus, you must power up the workflow of our app by integrating with these amazing stacks.

Ionic Framework, along with the Firebase, is a dynamic and mind-blowing duo that jointly provides us with outstanding flexibility in building and developing several unique real-time hybrid smartphone applications through JavaScript and HTML5. In addition, the app development cost with these is also quite efficient.

Conclusion

Ionic and Firebase truly are a powerful duo for building real-time, multi-platform smartphone applications using JavaScript and HTML5. Ionic and Firebase are shining examples of a high-quality framework.