Recommendations on Ionic View

Some advice for people who are using or want to use the Ionic View app (with "ionic upload") to test their app:

This is mainly my opinion, based on my experience so far, but as it stands I would NOT recommend using Ionic View except in some special cases.

An app that I developed recently was unbearably slow and very unreliable on a 2 year old Android tablet when tested with Ionic View. Not just slow/unresponsive, but also unreliable. When testing the same app by installing an APK, it was responsive and worked fine.

My client who tested the same app but then on the newest hardware (Samsung Galaxy S5) reported that the app worked but was VERY slow, on his cutting-edge hardware. Then after switching to an APK he reported that the app was now really fast.

Didn't quantify it but it sounded like a factor of 5 to 10 faster.

Couple this with the fact that building and installing an APK for Android doesn't take more than a few minutes, and that the whole "ionic upload" and "invitation" process is cumbersome and confusing, especially for the non-technical user.

Finally add the fact that you cannot test all of the hardware functions with Ionic View.

This leads me to the conclusion: do yourself a favor and just build and install an APK to test your Android app, don't bother with Ionic View.

The only good reason I found to use Ionic View is if you don't have a Mac, and therefore producing an iOS "IPA" file is a problem. But that may not be an issue anymore now that the Ionic Package service is available.