When comparing Ionic 2 vs jQuery Mobile, the Slant community recommends Ionic 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” Ionic 2 is ranked 8th while jQuery Mobile is ranked 13th.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Android, iOS and Windows Phone compatible
Pro Deploy as PWA
Pro Native functionality via Cordova plugins
Pro Built on Angular 2
Pro Resources
With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle.
Pro ThemeRoller
An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users can import a current theme, make changes, and export the theme back to the app for integration.
Pro Download Builder
To optimize application development jQuery Mobile provides a tool to allow the user to customize the framework. It contains the ability to pick and choose which modules to include and then bundles the framework so it contains only what is needed.
Cons
Con Old version
No point keeping this here, is the old version of ionic.
Con Uses WebView which impacts the app performance
Con The project is practically abandoned
The last release was in 2014. Samsung Tizen Advanced UI (TAU), for example, was started with JQuery, but it was forked off and completely rebuilt from scratch with jQuery concepts but without JQuery dependency itself.
Con Clunky and slow
Con No MVC support
There is no included MVC support in jQuery Mobile. It is possible to achieve this, however, using other frameworks such as BackboneJS in combination with jQuery Mobile, but there are a few limitations. Specifically that MVC frameworks, such as BackboneJS or KnockoutJS, are not compatible with jQuery Mobile page routing.