A Look at the Ionic Team's 2021 Plans Through Their Repositories

It is a new year, so I am going through repositories to see what the Ionic team is working on in 2021. I hope knowing what is coming helps your future development.

Ionic Framework 6.0.0

First, a big topic: the Ionic 6.0.0 milestone went up around mid last year.

https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/milestone/77

Ionic versions follow SemVer, so a v6 major release may include significant API changes. That is why a long validation period is planned—you can safely assume release is still a ways off. Interesting topics right now include:

Standard form validators (Constraint Validation DOM Methods) #21872
Breadcrumb UI #22701
Toast design updated to iOS 14 style #22676
canDismiss on Modal Controller #22308
Dismiss Toast with a swipe #22133
Modal swipe-to-dismiss also when swiping on ion-content #21227
Inject Ionic lifecycle hooks (ionViewWillEnter, etc.) into directives and components #19391

There are also breaking bug fixes, so check the milestone.

Capacitor 3.0.0

Capacitor 3.0.0 is planned. 3.0.0-alpha.11 is already out, so beta should be soon.

There are not many roundup articles on v3 yet. I plan to summarize again before the official release, but briefly the planned changes include:

Core plugins become separate packages you install individually (to shrink app bundle size)
On Android, you no longer need to load packages in MainActivity every time you add a plugin
npx cap run lets you deploy to a device without opening an IDE (Xcode, Android Studio)
Simpler plugin imports in code (below)

// old
import { Plugins } from '@capacitor/core';
const { MyPlugin } = Plugins;

// new
import { MyPlugin } from 'my-plugin';

Documentation is also starting here:

https://capacitorjs.com/docs/v3

Overall it feels like evolution toward finer-grained control.

Ionic Framework desktop support

Desktop support used to mean Grid, but work has started on finer desktop behavior—such as Picker control with the mouse scroll wheel. Personally I find #19886 interesting: fixing the fact that IonContent scrolling could not be printed on pages built with Ionic.

https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/milestone/67

Summary

2021 looks like another year of great progress, so I plan to watch closely and not get left behind. See you next time.

Ionic Framework 6.0.0

Capacitor 3.0.0

Other Topics

Ionic Framework accessibility (a11y)

Ionic Framework desktop support

Summary