Ionic 3 Release – Whats New?

WRITTEN BY GARETH DUNNE @JSDIARIES

Ionic 3 has released and with it, has brought some impressive but not overbearing changes to the Ionic framework.

While sites like Toptal have previously covered performance differences between Ionic 1 and 2.
This post will cover the upgrade from Ionic 2 to 3 and the performance differences that come with it.

Similar to the Angular 4 release, this isn’t a core change to the platform, rather it is adding some improvements to your applications that will increase overall performance and allows hybrid app development to come a few steps close to being on par with its native development counterparts.

As always here is some useful Ionic reading material. And here is the official post from the Ionic team specifying all the changes.

Updating from Ionic 2 is actually quite a simple process. This video from Paul Halliday simplifies the process even further:

Ionic has been updated to be compatible with Angular 4 and all the features that come with it. You can find our Angular 4 release post here.

And the official Angular blog covers it here aswell.

One of the most notable features of the release, lazy loading provides us with the ability to breakdown our bundles for our application even further.

This allows our application to only load certain bundles/modules when they are actually needed. When you lazy load, your application performance improves, particular as the app is starting up because all the modules that were previously loaded in our app.module.ts are not requested at once rather they are loaded on a page by page basis.

I would highly recommend checking out Paul Hallidays tutorial on this:

As specified on the official Ionic blog. Ionic 3 has been updated to be compatibly with Typescript versions 2.1 and 2.2. This is inline with **Angular 4 ** being compatible with these versions as well. More information can be found here.

So that just about summarizes the main changse for Ionic 3. I don’t think anyone can deny the momentum and progression that this framework has going for it.

While originally I was concentrating on all things Angular. Ionic has really provided such a sleek way to use web technologies in order to reach such a wider userbase and to target them more personally through mobile applications.

If you needed even more detail regarding Ionic 3 changes please check our Joshua Morony’s detailed guide here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vH-nYK7j4ca

I highly recommend all his content as it provides a huge insight into all potential features you might want to implement into your application.