Ionic v4 RC released with improved performance, UI Library distribution and more

Yesterday, the team at Ionic released the final candidate version for Ionic v4. The final version of Ionic v4 is expected to be released in early 2019. Ionic is the app platform for web developers for building mobile, web, and desktop apps with one shared code base and open web standards. Ionic v4 RC has been nicknamed Ionic Neutronium following the earlier RC versions Ionic 4.1 Hydrogen, Ionic 4.2 Helium, 4.3 Lithium, etc. With the final release candidate, the API has now been stabilized along with fixing patch and minor releases.

Improvements in Ionic v4 RC?

Mobile performance

Ionic v4 will come with improvement in app startup times, especially on mobile devices. It comes with smaller file sizes that work well with apps on iOS, Android, Electron, and PWAs.

Source: Ionic

Ivy Renderer for Angular users

Ionic v4 will be shipped with Angular Ivy Renderer. It is Angular’s fastest and smallest renderer so far and will prove to be useful for Angular and Ionic developers. Interestingly, even a simple Ivy “Hello World” app reduces down to a size of 2.7kb.

UI Library Distribution

Ionic Neutronium has made improvements to the UI library. It features the use of standard Web APIs like custom elements that are capable of lazy-loading themselves on-demand. Now both Angular and Ionic can iterate and improve independently, and developers can take advantage of these improvements with fewer restrictions.

Support for Angular tooling

Angular CLI and Router both have become production ready with this release and are capable of native-style navigation required by Ionic apps. This release also comes with an added support for Angular schematics, so Angular developers can run ng add @ionic/angular to add Ionic directly to their app.

Angular, React, and Vue

Ionic v4 RC allows users to continue using Ionic in their projects based on React or Vue. The goal behind this release was to decouple Ionic from any specific version of one single framework’s runtime and component model. Last month, Ionic community and Modus Create released the alpha version of @ionic/vue. @ionic/react is in progress and is expected to release soon.