February 11, 2015
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Built with Ionic: Viceversa

Katie Ginder-Vogel

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Viceversa is a social decision-making app that lets anyone in the world help you make choices. Questions as simple as, “Where should we go for dinner?” or as complex as, “What should I say to resolve this situation?” can be crowd-sourced. Close friends and family members can share their opinions privately.

The ViceVersa team is comprised of CEO Jonathan Widawski, the project leader, designer, and web developer; COO Alexis Schechter, an iOs developer and marketing director; and CTO Thomas Mary, a backend developer and technical director. The team chose to build their iOS app using native code and their Android app with Ionic.

“Ionic allowed us to create our app in no time, compared to our native iOS app,” says Widawski. “Since Thomas and I are huge Angular fans, the learning curve for Ionic was really smooth, and we got started quickly. Design-wise, we used almost everything Ionic provided, from CSS to JS utils, and tweaked most of them to respect the new material design guidelines and our own design.”

At the time Widawski and Mary were developing the Android version of Viceversa, they were also building their website. “Ionic was the game changer in our development process,” says Widawski. “It gave us the opportunity to create a beautiful, AngularJS-based Android app using the resources we had: web development. Ionic allowed us to re-use what’s been done for our web app and simply copy and paste a lot of our previously completed work. It was delightful.”

Widawski notes that Ionic’s recent updates demonstrate an effort to catch up with previous performance issues on Android. “Every recent update was a pleasant surprise in Android performance,” he says. “Design-wise, we decided to follow, as best as we could, the Material Design guidelines provided by Google. If you have the occasion to try both apps, you will see that they are very different: Every process was built with the platform in mind.”

The Viceversa team is passionate about split testing, and leveraged it with the app. “We tried two radically different designs and interfaces because we want to know what works best,” says Widawski. “We plan to create tutorials on how to make most of the animation within our app and on how to improve performance on Android globally.”

Widawski, a frontend developer who also has experience with PHP and the Laravel framework, adds, “There is an Ionic way of doing things. You don’t get lost; it is very well documented and up-to-date; and if you have any questions, the forum has one of the most active and helpful communities I’ve seen.”

Mary found Ionic to be straightforward and well-integrated with AngularJS. “There’s really little to no room for hesitation when coding,” he says. “That’s what we love about Angular, and that’s what we love about Ionic.”

Get the Android version of Viceversa (built with Ionic).

Get the iOS version of Viceversa.


Katie Ginder-Vogel