Daily News Mobile App
A mobile application for reading news articles from various sources.
I wanted to learn a framework that could be used to build mobile applications. I decided to go with the Ionic Framework and gave myself five calm evenings to complete the task. I thought it would be a good idea to use some API and a database, but nothing too fancy.
So, I kept brainstorming what I could build. A few more interesting project ideas came to mind, and I'm still keeping them safe in my head for the future. 😉 But this article isn't about those projects - maybe one day I'll get to them.
So What's My Project About?
To keep things simple, I chose to use News API and Firebase. The app itself isn't particularly groundbreaking - it fetches the latest world news, and a logged-in user can read articles and save them for later, in case they want to come back to them, let's say, when catching up on politics.
Why Ionic?
Mostly because I feel most comfortable working with Vue.js. Yes, I know I could have gone with Quasar or even other solutions like NativeScript. But at that moment, Ionic seemed like the simplest and fastest to pick up.
Was it really the easiest? I don't know, since I haven't tried the alternatives. But I do remember that at times I wanted to throw the project away because I constantly felt like Ionic wasn't really listening to me and was doing its own thing. By the time I'm writing this article, three months have passed since I built the app, so I don't remember all the details, but I do know those issues were there… maybe something with element positioning? 🤔
Was It Worth It?
I still consider it a good learning experience because I also got to use Firebase - before this, I hadn't spent more than five minutes with it. And at least now I know that Vue.js is capable of powering some sort of mobile applications... though in the future I might give Quasar or React Native a try.