You mention Ionic at the end, so I have to comment as the co-founder :)
The first thought is on maintenance and support from Google/Facebook compared to someone like Ionic. One of the things people don't think about before it's too late is support, and Ionic is unique in mobile in that we actually make money from supporting our technology directly for customers. We have direct support available for our auth/security/data storage plugins, cloud services, and open source projects. We literally will respond to customer support tickets and make fixes/patches on a weekend if we have to.
Is there any other company out there doing what Ionic is in mobile? You mention having issues with the Web View component, is Google or Facebook ever going to prioritize your issues? It's not likely, they don't have that kind of business model around their technology like Ionic does. Facebook builds RN for itself, and who knows what Google's end-goal is with Flutter (drive GCP adoption? push its ad network?) but it's certainly not to monetize it through dedicated support for the most significant users of it. I'm proud that the Ionic stack is the most user-aligned offering out there because we're literally in the business of supporting and extending users of our OSS stack.
On the Web View side, we've recently shipped one of the first mobile micro-frontend projects in the ecosystem called Ionic Portals which is basically an awesome Web View component powered by our tech and expertise building web view experiences on mobile. Right now it doesn't have RN or Flutter bindings but we are working on them this year. This has been a pretty interesting shift for us and we're now working with traditional native teams not using the traditional Ionic stack:
It would be great if Ionic offered consulting for things like Cordova -> Capacitor migrations. However, the last time I talked to sales it seemed like the best we could get was a report on what plugins we could or couldn't use with Capacitor.
> we're literally in the business of supporting and extending users of our OSS stack
Can you define that a little bit better? Because I've contacted Ionic sales before about seemingly well-used but under-maintained plugins and was basically told we were on our own.
AppFlow isn't a horrible product—but the recent price increases gave me a sour taste. What am I getting for my money? OK. I'm getting a build system which is nice, but I can't stomach paying the new (nearly 10x) price just to be able to do things like kick off builds from CI or the CLI.
What I _would_ pay for is help with other OSS plugin issues, consulting to migrate to Capacitor, training and help with maintaining custom projects, or better yet general development support when things go south (like the dreaded white-screen of death).
Anyway, we've been happy with Ionic and are always excited to see things improve. I don't mean to be downer—rather I'd love to give you guys money so long as it makes sense!
Ooh Portals is interesting. My team went with implementing our own bindings on WebView (Android) to enable functionality from SPA/PWA, but there are definitely some growing pains/unexpected hiccups compared to desktop browsers.
I wish the Expo team offered support plans. Its an amazing product and they now sell hosting, but support is something I would (have my company) pay upwards of thousands of dollars a year for.
When you get stuck on a strange bug or find something in the docs doesn't work as expected your only options are Discord and GH issues. Neither feels appropriate as GH issues are slow and you get lost in the noise and Discord is a sea of noise that you're never sure if anyone with serious answers may be able to help you.
We've built amazing things with Expo (now that you can run almost any native code you want in an Expo app) but support would be an easy purchase.
The first thought is on maintenance and support from Google/Facebook compared to someone like Ionic. One of the things people don't think about before it's too late is support, and Ionic is unique in mobile in that we actually make money from supporting our technology directly for customers. We have direct support available for our auth/security/data storage plugins, cloud services, and open source projects. We literally will respond to customer support tickets and make fixes/patches on a weekend if we have to.
Is there any other company out there doing what Ionic is in mobile? You mention having issues with the Web View component, is Google or Facebook ever going to prioritize your issues? It's not likely, they don't have that kind of business model around their technology like Ionic does. Facebook builds RN for itself, and who knows what Google's end-goal is with Flutter (drive GCP adoption? push its ad network?) but it's certainly not to monetize it through dedicated support for the most significant users of it. I'm proud that the Ionic stack is the most user-aligned offering out there because we're literally in the business of supporting and extending users of our OSS stack.
On the Web View side, we've recently shipped one of the first mobile micro-frontend projects in the ecosystem called Ionic Portals which is basically an awesome Web View component powered by our tech and expertise building web view experiences on mobile. Right now it doesn't have RN or Flutter bindings but we are working on them this year. This has been a pretty interesting shift for us and we're now working with traditional native teams not using the traditional Ionic stack:
https://ionic.io/portals