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Android SDK vs Ionic: What are the differences?

Introduction Android SDK and Ionic are both platforms that are used for developing mobile applications. However, there are several key differences between the two.

  1. Programming Language: Android SDK uses Java or Kotlin as the primary programming languages for developing applications. On the other hand, Ionic uses web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This allows developers with web development skills to easily transition to Ionic development.

  2. Performance: Android SDK applications are native, meaning they are developed specifically for the Android platform and can make full use of device capabilities. This generally results in better performance compared to Ionic applications, which are web-based and rely on a WebView to render the user interface.

  3. Access to Device Features: Android SDK provides extensive access to native device features such as GPS, camera, storage, etc. This allows developers to create applications that interact closely with the underlying hardware. Ionic, on the other hand, relies on plugins to access device features, which may not provide the same level of control and functionality as the native access.

  4. App Distribution: Android SDK applications are distributed through the Google Play Store, which provides a centralized and reliable platform for users to discover and download applications. Ionic applications can be distributed either through app stores or as progressive web apps, giving developers more flexibility in reaching their target audience.

  5. Development Time: Android SDK generally requires more development time due to the need for writing platform-specific code and handling device fragmentation. Ionic, being a cross-platform framework, allows developers to write once and deploy across multiple platforms, reducing development time and effort.

  6. Community Support and Resources: Android SDK has a larger developer community and a vast amount of resources, documentation, libraries, and sample code available. This makes it easier for developers to find solutions to their problems and get help when needed. While Ionic also has a growing community, it may not have the same level of resources and support as the Android community.

In summary, Android SDK and Ionic differ in terms of programming language, performance, access to device features, app distribution, development time, and community support. The choice between the two depends on the specific requirements of the application and the skill sets of the developers.

Advice on Android SDK and Ionic
Needs advice
on
FlutterFlutterIonicIonic
and
React NativeReact Native

Hi, we are an early startup (with an iPOC prototype) but need to get started on our MVP, and our tech developers in India recommended a hybrid, and they use Ionic, then we spoke with a software company in the US and he recommended Flutter or React Native. Any advice or input for us on the differences between these? Our app will need Bluetooth GPS for "near me" and social media sharing reviews capability, and also link on the backend with businesses. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

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Replies (6)
Ahmad Khan
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

I would never recommend you to go with Ionic, Because of the User experience it provides is subpar. Flutter is most promising, Can be easily used to develop great user experience in no time. React native is also good, but it's phasing out in my opinion, while Ionic has already phased out. Flutter also provides great developer experience, resulting in fast and productive developers. I would have to press hard to think of a CON about flutter when recommending it for your needs.

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Dario Alves
Arquiteto de Software at Senior sistemas · | 2 upvotes · 496.9K views
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Maturity, Community, Facility, Libs React Native is the principal platform of mobile cross-platform development today, Flutter is it's a promise.

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Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Flutter is built on DART which is written in GO. GO compiles to binary. Hence is faster than any java based framework. It provides superior performance and has a simplified UI process for designing apps.

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Kevin Lücke
CTO at claimsforce GmbH · | 1 upvotes · 496K views
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

It depends also on your team skills. Flutter is fast to learn, fast to develop with and the performance is much better in comparison to React. If your team is already highly skilled in React Native it could be the better option - if not Flutter is my 100% recommendation. We rapidly prototype and deliver MVPs with Flutter since two years.

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Recommends
on
IonicIonic
at

I don‘t have practical experience with flutter but between ionic and react native I‘d say both a perfectly viable options and we have used both for a number of production apps. We normally go with ionic on capacitor because we build a lot of pwa/web apps so we can use the same code for all. We don‘t use much of ionic elements, we do most styles on our own.

The comments that the user experience is bad I cannot agree with. A well designed and developed ionic apo can hardly be distinguished from a native app. But obviously that depends also on the usecase and type of app.

I hope this helps

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Nicolas Kovacs
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Even if React Native is older (I didn't say mature) you should go for Flutter, It's works really well and the developer experience is great (auto-completion, plugin etc). I spent years with React Native and now I am using Flutter and I don't regret It. Even if you have to learn a new language, It's pretty simple even more If you know some OOP, Java and Javascript ES6 syntax in some case. One other advantage is the facility to design app in Flutter, you have widgets for everything and you can adapt any design made by your designer. For example you can't make a simple custom box shadow with React-Native ...

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Alexis Poveda
Needs advice
on
ElectronElectronFlutterFlutter
and
IonicIonic

Hi! I have to develop a software solution for a youth church group, for my graduation project. In the first meeting that I have with the coordinators, they did not have a clear idea of what they want. The biggest problem they have is the attendance control, they do it manually and that causes errors.

I was thinking of developing an Android app in Android Studio because that is the tool I master, but a friend told me that I consider using a tool that builds for iOS, Android and web. I have like 6 months. I own a MacBookAir but I do not know Swift (for iOS). I am familiar with MySQL, PHP, Apache, JSP,HTML,CSS.

Summary: What tool can I use that is easy to learn and easy to scale?

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Replies (5)
Recommends
on
IonicIonic

It's probably not relevant anymore, but I think Ionic with Angular as the frontend is the right choice. For IDE I would choose Visual Studio Code. You can just create a basic web application with responsive design, which is already included if you are going to use Ionic components with Material Design to create your app. You don't need to know Swift, you don't even have to create mobile apps, just create a responsive (Ionic already is) web app, or PWA. Upon browsing your website from a mobile device for example using google chrome, you will be prompted to create a shortcut of the website in your mobile phone. After you do this, there will be an icon in your phone that looks like an icon to launch an app, it will launch your website in full screen mode - for the user's perspective it will look like he is using a native app. Access https://ionicframework.com/docs/angular/pwa from your android chrome browser, go to tab options (3 vertical dots), click on Add to Home screen. When you launch the website from the shortcut, you'll see that it behaves and looks like a native app.

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Recommends
on
IonicIonic

I think you should chose between Flutter and Ionic. With those two options, the main question is about graphs and performance. Are they really important for your application? If the answer is yes, your tool is Flutter but, if the answer is that you need an easy tool to create an app with some basic components I would choose Ionic. You have a library with lots of components that you can use and they have native UI by default (for Android and iOS).

You will find more support if you use Ionic with Angular as frontend framework (you have the option to use Vue or React but this is a new feature for Ionic and I think there are more difficult to learn than Angular).

You can develop and debug the majority of features on PC (I don't know if that is possible with Flutter). And when you will finish the app, create iOS and Android versions is simple.

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Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Flutter is easy to use and easy to understand. Once you have completed the android platform, you can easily build it to ios, Web or desktop on a single code base.

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Carlos Esteban Lopez Jaramillo
Recommends
on
IonicIonic
  1. Electron is for desktop apps, so not useful for you.
  2. Flutter has better performance, but Ionic is decent as well, I would use Ionic unless you're making a game or graphic-intensive app.
  3. Ionic is more flexible since you have the whole NPM ecosystem available, while flutter is more recent, thus libraries for it are less in quantity and battle-tested than the ones in NPM.
  4. Ionic 4 introduced CSS variables, which improved immensely the theming process for the app, which was the hardest issue Ionic development had.
  5. Ionic has extended to many frameworks so it's compatible with Angular and React frameworks, meaning more flexibility, personally I would recommend Ionic with Angular over React since it's more suited to enterprise-level apps.
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Alejandro Ulate Fallas
Mobile Developer at Build SRL · | 2 upvotes · 303.5K views
Recommends
on
IonicIonic

Hi there. So Electron embeds everything in a webview, which means that what you would have to develop would be a Node project most probably. Ionic does the same (kindof but won't bore you with specifics) but it does it much more efficiently. Usually you do Ionic apps with JS frameworks like Angular or React (this one recently added). Flutter on the other hand does native apps, it does it really good but it's support for Web is in beta and it's relatively simple to setup if you already know the SDK and the environment.

My recommendation would be that you do your app using Angular/Ionic if you reaaally need the multi-platform environment and there's different reasons in this case:

  • Since it's a graduation project you need it to be as simple as it can be and adding a new technology adds to the learning curve.
  • Flutter is great if you have different complex UI or if you have specific performance needs that require native support and in your case it does not seem like you need that.
  • Flutter is also an incredibly powerful tool but it's learning curve might be tricky if you have not developed native apps before so I wouldn't recommend you start off like this if you have time sensitive projects like a graduation project. It does have great docs and an awesome community but I'd suggest you stick as close to what you know as you can.
  • Ionic/Angular uses Typescript (a type javascript wrapper) and Angular (JS framework) so you will have to learn a little bit but if you already know HTML, CSS and Javascript you won't have that much of a hard time. Also there's quite a lot in terms of documentation and tooling already tested around this combination.
  • Ionic/Angular has a really good CLI that helps you stick to the architecture they recommend so you wouldn't have to worry about it that much.
  • Ionic/Angular helps you test either locally in the web browser as well as your devices which is in the end what you want if you are looking for a multi-platform system. Flutter also does this but is not quite in a stable state (yet!).

Anyway, in the end, if you go for the multi-platform suggestion I think, because of time you would be better off with Ionic. If you decide that you don't need that as of right now (which is fine as well) you can start with just the Android app and plan on the different things you might eventually need like a website or other different stuff. Cheers!

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Decisions about Android SDK and Ionic
Omran Jamal
CTO & Co-founder at Bonton Connect · | 7 upvotes · 560K views

We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.

This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.

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Thuan Nguyen
FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER · | 5 upvotes · 621.9K views
  • Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
  • Easy to learn & deployed production
  • Fast development
  • Strong community
  • Completed Documents
  • Native performance with lower RAM used.
  • Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
  • Powered by Facebook.
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awesomebanana2018
Chose
FlutterFlutter
over
IonicIonic

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

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Pros of Android SDK
Pros of Ionic
  • 289
    Android development
  • 155
    Necessary for android
  • 128
    Android studio
  • 86
    Mobile framework
  • 82
    Backed by google
  • 27
    Platform-tools
  • 21
    Eclipse + adt plugin
  • 5
    Powerful, simple, one stop environment
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Больно
  • 248
    Allows for rapid prototyping
  • 228
    Hybrid mobile
  • 208
    It's angularjs
  • 186
    Free
  • 179
    It's javascript, html, and css
  • 109
    Ui and theming
  • 78
    Great designs
  • 74
    Mv* pattern
  • 71
    Reuse frontend devs on mobile
  • 65
    Extensibility
  • 31
    Great community
  • 29
    Open source
  • 23
    Responsive design
  • 21
    Good cli
  • 14
    So easy to use
  • 13
    Angularjs-based
  • 13
    Beautifully designed
  • 12
    Widgets
  • 11
    Allows for rapid prototyping, hybrid mobile
  • 11
    Typescript
  • 10
    Quick prototyping, amazing community
  • 10
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Angular2 support
  • 7
    Fast, easy, free
  • 7
    Because of the productivity and easy for development
  • 7
    Base on angular
  • 7
    So much thought behind what developers actually need
  • 6
    Super fast, their dev team is amazingly passionate
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 6
    It's Angular
  • 4
    UI is awesome
  • 4
    Hot deploy
  • 3
    Material design support using theme
  • 3
    Amazing support
  • 3
    It's the future
  • 3
    Angular
  • 3
    Allow for rapid prototyping
  • 3
    Easy setup, development and testing
  • 3
    Ionic creator
  • 2
    User Friendly
  • 2
    It's angular js
  • 2
    Complete package
  • 2
    Simple & Fast
  • 2
    Fastest growing mobile app framework
  • 2
    Best Support and Community
  • 2
    Material Design By Default
  • 2
    Cross platform
  • 2
    Documentation
  • 2
    Because I can use my existing web devloper skills
  • 2
    Removes 300ms delay in mobile browsers
  • 1
    Responsive
  • 1
    Native access
  • 1
    Typescript support
  • 1
    Ionic conect codeigniter
  • 1
    Fast Prototyping
  • 1
    All Trending Stack

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Cons of Android SDK
Cons of Ionic
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 20
      Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps
    • 15
      Not meant for game development
    • 2
      Not a native app

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    What is Android SDK?

    Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

    What is Ionic?

    Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Android SDK?
    What companies use Ionic?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Android SDK or Ionic.
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    What tools integrate with Android SDK?
    What tools integrate with Ionic?

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    Blog Posts

    Android SDKBugsnagLeakCanary+3
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    Jul 16 2019 at 9:19PM

    Bugsnag

    JavaAndroid SDKBugsnag+3
    3
    427
    GitHubPythonNode.js+47
    54
    72313
    What are some alternatives to Android SDK and Ionic?
    Android Studio
    Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready.
    React Native
    React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
    Flutter
    Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.
    Xamarin
    Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
    Corona SDK
    It is a cross-platform framework ideal for rapidly creating apps and games for mobile devices and desktop systems. It builds rich mobile apps for iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook. Build high quality mobile apps in a fraction of the time.
    See all alternatives