The 9 most common mistakes that Ionic developers make

Ionic has been around for two years now. It is a great set of tools for developing hybrid applications based on AngularJS. Ionic is extremely popular at the moment, with more than one million applications built and a growing community of thousands of developers.

Since Ionic’s first release, time has passed, and web technologies and best practices have evolved in many ways. Therefore, it is hard to determine which path to follow when starting a new project. In these conditions, developers can make mistakes potentially impacting the quality of their applications or the productivity of their team.

By reading the following common mistakes, you will have the keys to avoiding fundamental problems and to create performant and scalable applications with Ionic.

Ionic is extremely popular at the moment, with more than one million applications built.

Common mistake #1: Forgetting to enable Native Scrolling

Native Scrolling allows Ionic to listen to scrolling events on supported webviews. It makes Pull to Refresh, List Reordering and Infinite Scroll possible without JavaScript scrolling, which was created in a time when browsers lacked proper scroll events.

Native Scrolling is enabled by default on Android since Ionic 1.2 (December 2015). It is a huge performance and user experience improvement, as it ensures a smooth scroll due to asynchronous events.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of proper events on iOS, the native scrolling is not enabled for that platform yet.

If you are using a version prior to 1.2, you can enable Native Scrolling for Android using $ionicConfigProvider:

// Enable Native Scrolling on Android
$ionicConfigProvider.platform.android.scrolling.jsScrolling(false);

You also can enable or disable Native Scrolling on any page using overflow-scroll directive on any ion-content:

Common mistake #2: Not using the Ionic CLI to install platforms and plugins

Common mistake #3: Thinking performance comes out of the box

Common mistake #4: Having confusions with the View Cache logic

Common mistake #5: Not knowing about Crosswalk for Android

Common mistake #6: Trying to run Cordova plugins inside the browser

Common mistake #7: Following the starter kit architecture for large scale applications

Common mistake #8: Binding events to onscroll, and forgetting about requestAnimationFrame

Common mistake #9: Prototyping Ionic applications manually

Conclusion