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Add to SafariWhen comparing jQuery Mobile vs Ionic Framework, the Slant community recommends Ionic Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” Ionic Framework is ranked 1st while jQuery Mobile is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Ionic Framework is:
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Cordova plugins
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Pro Large, friendly and active community
Ionic Framework is currently one of the most popular frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. This has resulted in a very large community of active users who contribute to the community by writing tutorials and answering questions.
Pro Free and open source
Ionic is free to use and open source, resulting in an active and helpful community of users and contributors.
Cons
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.
Con Can be buggy
Ionic is still a young framework (version 1.0 was released in May 2015). There are still some quirks and bugs in the framework to work out, which you can see a list of on their Github.
However Ionic is under active development and bugs are generally addressed quickly.
