Writing a native Ionic plugin for Capacitor in less than 30 minutes
TLDR: When the pandemic first started, I decided to develop a contact-tracing mobile app. I was studying Computer Science at the time and decided to use the same cross-platform framework that we were using on our course - Ionic. I wanted to use Google's Nearby Messages API to share packets of information between iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth, but I couldn't find a plugin for this, so I decided to write my own!
Ionic is a cross-platform mobile framework which allows you to develop an app using JavaScript/HTML/CSS and share this single implementation across different native devices. This Ionic project can then be compiled to native source code (Android/iOS) using Ionic's tool, Capacitor.
Using a cross-platform framework like this to develop your mobile app is almost always a good idea, because it means you can maintain a single codebase which runs on both Android and iOS. This means you're not duplicating business logic across two different codebases in two different languages with two different teams (to be avoided).
If you're looking to write some native code in a cross-platform project but you're still deciding which framework to use, check out this Theodo blog post on React Native as well!
