I build the occasional small mobile application. I evaluated Ionic, React Native, and Flutter about 18 months ago; and ultimately landed on Ionic for the projects I needed to ship.
Next one will likely use Flutter.
The "Hello world" story on Ionic is pretty good--you generate a project and it works. But configuring and maintaining the various layers (Ionic, Cordova, Android Studio and XCode projects for actual building the apps) has been pretty brutal for apps I only touch every few months. So many dependencies that prove very difficult to update correctly.
The story looks to be improving with Capacitor though, so I suppose I'll give it another look when that stabilizes.
Hey Brad, definitely take a look at Capacitor. We built it explicitly to solve those issues in Cordova. Also keep in mind Flutter also has to deal with native projects and deps so there are some “hard problems” not unique to Cordova here
Oh I have no doubt the grass isn't purely greener on the Flutter side. There's a ton of moving parts here for any solution to deal with.
Capacitor does look really nice--it was in early beta (maybe even alpha) last time I started a new app project, haven't looked since. Will definitely give it a fair shake when the opportunity arises.
EDIT:
Adding a bit context to my earlier comment: one of the bigger points of frustration in managing dependencies was figuring out which versions of ionic, ionic-native, ionic/angular, angular, and angular's 6 dozen peer deps actually work together.
Definitely doesn't help that I don't use Angular or Ionic on a regular basis, but documenting the expected versions of other components would be a huge help for me.
Next one will likely use Flutter.
The "Hello world" story on Ionic is pretty good--you generate a project and it works. But configuring and maintaining the various layers (Ionic, Cordova, Android Studio and XCode projects for actual building the apps) has been pretty brutal for apps I only touch every few months. So many dependencies that prove very difficult to update correctly.
The story looks to be improving with Capacitor though, so I suppose I'll give it another look when that stabilizes.