Ionic Components for Quickly Building Your App MVP

Building an app is difficult, but with the help of Ionic, you can make things a bit easier.

While the framework can have a bit of a learning curve at first, it brings several powerful features to your project. One of the most useful of these is its use of modular components, which can be reused between projects, helping to save time and resources when building your MVP.

Let’s take a deeper look at what these components are, how they can help your project, and a few of the most popular ones available right now.

What Are Ionic Components?

Similar to other frameworks, such as React Native, the Ionic Framework makes use of a structure called a component.

In Ionic, these components are often UI elements in pieces of modular code that can be used throughout a project. They work similarly to how a function does in JavaScript, with a standalone snippet of code that can be called from elsewhere in your codebase, complete with any necessary parameters.

These UI components often contain more than code, though, with self-contained rendering and logic hidden within each.

With all of these attributes in mind, let’s look at how these components can benefit your project.

The Power of Ionic Components

Ionic components have a number of benefits they provide to projects, with the biggest being:

Their modular structure enables code reuse throughout your project.
Their self-contained nature lets you modify each component easily, and allows it to be updated throughout your app with minimal additional work.
Components can be reused between projects and imported easily from kits, templates, and other projects.

The last point is what I want to focus on, as this means that you can easily bring complete portions of your UI in from external sources.

By making use of collections of these components, you can build out your project more quickly, with less time, and avoid having to program the repetitive pieces that most apps have.

Let’s dig in to some of the most popular Ionic components available on CodeCanyon right now.

Ionic 3 UI Theme: Yellow Dark

This UI kit packages together a massive number of components and screens for every situation. Using a kit like this will often get you 70% of the way towards your user interface and app goals, with only minor tweaks and styling changes necessary to put together a complete front-end app.

With over 100 screens in this kit, and even more components, there’s a lot to work with here. Let’s look at some of the components that come bundled in:

list views and tab views
map integrations
support for QR code generation and reading
alert and modal components
user forms and elements
payment integration components
user profiles and accounts
animated loaders and spinners

Using all of these components, you can easily knock out tedious front-end work and common functionality. For those developers out there who need a bit of help in the design department, using a component kit like this can even help you to put together a beautiful mock-up for your app and easily turn it into reality.

Our next pre-built component may not come packed with as much variety, but it makes up for that in usefulness.

Authy Social Authentication

Authy is an advanced login system for Ionic, providing the capabilities for social authentication that are common on many apps. Its set of screens and components can be used to quickly allow login for your app using email, phone, Facebook, or Google authentication.

This is one of those features that exists in almost every app you’ll make, but somehow, when you go to implement it, there’s always a weird snag that starts to eat up your project’s time.

Using this set of components, you won’t have to worry about that anymore! Drop in the components, hook them into Firebase, and you’re good to go! If you aren’t using Firebase for your app, you might have to do some fiddling, but the components are still likely to give you a huge head start.

Crunchy: Restaurant Booking Application

Focusing on a specific niche, Crunchy is an Ionic application built with easily removable components that can be dropped into your own projects with ease. Crunchy can be considered a full-on template in its own right, but for crafty developers it has a ton of time-intensive pieces that can be salvaged for other apps.

Here are some of the included components that can be repurposed for your own projects:

user authentication (including social authentication through Facebook and Google)
payment gateway components for popular processors (Stripe and PayPal)
menu with ordering capabilities

This one might be cheating a bit, since it is technically a template that you have to lift useful components out of. In many cases, though, these kinds of templates end up being the best value, especially those that are well-coded and highly modular. Think of it as purchasing a collection of pre-built components that are already tested to be compatible, and with examples of how the different components within can be dropped into your project’s skeleton.

Our last entry is a goldmine of available components, so let’s check it out!

Ionic Advanced Components Project

This free Ionic components project located on GitHub contains a huge number of components, ready to use to build your app or to learn from.

Within the project you’ll find components, adapted CodePens, and code exclusive to the project that gives you access to 30+ components, as well as screens and other useful resources.

All of the resources involved are free to use. Here are a few of the components within the project:

accordion lists
countdown timer
parallax header
sliding drawers
timelines
timer progress

While the components involved might be a bit simpler than the premium items on CodeCanyon, they can help to fill in any needed gaps when building your own project.

What Components Do You Use?

When building out your own projects, what are the component sources you use the most? How have they helped to speed up your development time?

Tell us about them and share your experience in the comments below!