Vishal BhatiaIn the mobile technology era, many companies are creating mobile applications. It provides their users a more convenient, faster and pleasant experience. The more convenient the access to the service, the more attractive it is, and the more profits are able to be generated.
But not all customers can afford to hire enough developers to create several native applications for different platforms, and not all companies have the necessary in-house specialists.
There are technologies that allow developers to create cross-platform applications with JavaScript. JavaScript works great when combined with other frameworks, such as Angular JS. AngularJS is one of the best solutions to build a universal app.
In the article, we’ll talk about how it’s possible to build an Android app using Angular JS. We’ll also discuss some additional tools that enhance how web and native technologies are created.
What are hybrid applications?
Android hybrid applications, like native ones, can be installed on mobile devices. You can easily find them in the Play Store. But why a hybrid app?
Like sites, hybrid mobile applications consist of HTML layout, CSS styles, and Angular JS or any other JavaScript code. The key point of such applications is that the application resources are wrapped in a native application and executed in a full-screen WebView (browser). This shell allows you to establish communication with all smartphone devices, such as cameras, accelerometers, physical buttons, speakers, microphones, etc. In fact, the capabilities of such applications are limited only by the processing and rendering speed of the built-in system browser.
To date, the most popular shell for hybrid applications is Apache Cordova. It’s a platform that, in addition to wrapping the code in a WebView, provides a huge set of JavaScript API plugins, which can be used to fully interact with the operating system and smartphone devices. Cordova has a large community, with a lot of ready-made solutions and plug-ins for a full-fledged application. There are a number of beautiful, modern UI’s that give applications the convenient control and the feeling that it’s an app, rather than an adapted site.
A good addition to Angular JS is the Ionic framework. Ionic is a framework with a stunningly designed graphical interface, styled for various platforms, with the maximum similarity to native applications. The framework uses Angular JS and SASS, which make it very popular among developers, as these technologies have been developed to be straightforward to learn. The core of the framework is Cordova, so all the Cordova plugins work great on Ionic. Additionally, you can use Angular JS templates and write code segments on Angular JS.
In addition to the platform and ready-made UI components, Ionic has a thoughtful command line interface (CLI) that allows you to generate icons, splash screens, launch the live reload server in the browser with the app for debugging, and perform Android app development with short commands in the console.
More about the framework:
UI
Ionic has dozens of ready-made Angular JS templates and other components, which are constantly being refined and more new ones are added all the time. The quality of the elements and their interaction are pleasantly surprising.
OS oriented styles
Ionic is not just a good interface, it is adapted to the specifics of various operating systems and has been well thought out, down to the smallest detail. Animations, icons, fonts, will look like the operating system under which the application is built (Android or iOS, and even Windows Phone).
Compilation
If an AngularJS development company has experience building Android apps with Cordova, then the developers know the initial setting of dependencies is critical for a successful project. To build an application for a specific operating system, they need to install a number of mandatory dependencies.
Splashes and application icons
To publish an Android application in the Play market, mobile development companies need to make a lot of splashes and icons for different screen sizes. Ionic contains a tool out of the box that will generate all the necessary images, put it in the right folder and set all the paths to the files.
Ionic view
To show the Angular JS based application to the customer or open access to it for testing during the Android app development, Ionic provides an excellent service that allows you to quickly share the application with selected people.
Console commands that will be required for the application distribution
This way you can quickly show the demo version and perform testing before buying a developer account in the Play Store.
Performance
Performance is a key stumbling block in hybrid applications. For example, WebView (a technology that allows existing hybrid applications) does not always use operating system constructors for trivial things. This is just one of the reasons why hybrid applications are more sluggish than native ones.
The team at Ionic have worked to minimize the performance loss by using optimized components of the framework and the introduction in their CLI for the ability to install Crosswalk.
Crosswalk allows you to run the application on your phone by using the latest Chromium version, rather than the standard WebVIew.
This will allow:
- The ability to use the latest browser technology even on older mobile devices (WebRTC, WebGL, etc.)
- Improvement of debugging with Chrome DevTools.
- An increase in the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript performance. This is as important as Angular JS’s use of the JavaScript code.
To install Crosswalk in your application, you must first add the Android platforms and then install Crosswalk plugin.
Applications will then be compiled with Crosswalk installed (the apk file size will increase by about 20 MB).
To date, Ionic is not just a framework, it’s an entire ecosystem for developing, building, testing and distributing hybrid mobile applications using Angular JS. This is an innovation that allows Angular JS development companies to enter the mobile app development market and create beautiful, productive applications.
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