Make HTTP Requests In Android And iOS With Ionic Framework

As a modern developer, at some point in time you’re going to find yourself needing to work with a RESTful API. You’re going to need to make HTTP requests to get data into your app or even change data on a remote database.

Lucky for us, making HTTP requests with Ionic Framework is a heck of a lot easier than making them with native code.

The following will show you how to make GET requests for JSON data at some fictional API endpoint. It is for Ionic Framework 1. If you’re looking for how to make HTTP requests using Ionic 2, check here.

Use Font Awesome Glyph Icons With Android

Creating clean looking user interfaces in Android can often be challenging. With all the screen resolutions and screen densities that exist for Android, a lot more must be taken into consideration than iOS apps.

A nifty trick I figured out is being able to use font glyphs instead of PNG or JPEG images. When using standard images you must create an image for every density (xxhdpi, xhdpi, hdpi, mdpi) and even then it still might not look clear. When using font glyphs, the images will always look crisp because they are vector graphics.

For this example, I’m going to use Font Awesome because it is open source and there are more than 400 glyphs included.

Add A Splash Screen To An Ionic Framework Project

It is always nice to have splash screens in your application. It is a great way to get your branding out, and show that your application is currently loading. No one likes to see a blank white screen for five seconds during launch.

Lucky for us, it is incredibly simple to add a splash screen to our Ionic project. Using Apache Cordova’s Splashscreen plugin, we can add a splash to our application with just two lines in our config.xml file.

Making Android In-App Purchases With Ionic Framework

The future of mobile app design is in the freemium model. No one wants to risk paying for an application that might stink so as a developer it is a good idea to charge for features in your app rather than the app itself.

Using Apache Cordova, Ionic Framework, and the poiuytrez AndroidInAppBilling plugin you can easily handle Android in-app purchases.

Internationalization And Localization With Ionic Framework And Angular Translate

There are roughly seven billion people in the world (7,000,000,000) and roughly 6,500 languages. Lucky for us, Android and iOS does not support all 6,500 of these languages. However, many are supported and this means that when you make an application in your native language, chances are your audience is only going to be a fraction of these people.

Recently I discovered Angular Tranlate, a JavaScript library for AngularJS. It allows you to create translation tables in your web application to quickly switch between depending on the language you desire. When you pair this with Ionic Framework, which supports AngularJS, you have a great way of adding internationalization and localization into your mobile application.

Send Email From Android And iOS With Ionic Framework

Sending email directly from your mobile application might be critical at some point in time. You may want to create an easy outlet for users to send you feedback about your app without having to sift through your website. Using the Apache Cordova plugin, Email Composer, you can easily send email from Android and iOS with Ionic Framework.

So You Made An App, Now What?

So you’ve just made an awesome app and you have no idea how to get the word out. This is a problem most app developers have, so you’re not alone.

I’ve released many mobile apps to the app store, most of them Android, but still a diverse collection. It has been tough work, but I’ve established myself by getting many downloads, maintaining a high average rating, and getting a few hundred dollars monthly in app revenue.