Use of ionic as desktop web application

Question

Ionic is a great framework to develop mobile apps using html5. We want same application to be used over desktop browser also. Will it be good idea to make a single responsive UI

Answer 1

Interestingly, it seems to be possible to produce a desktop version of an Ionic app using a toolkit named 'Electron' which is sort of a desktop equivalent of Cordova/Phonegap, as explained in this article:

http://alexbergin.com/2015/streamlining-desktop-and-mobile-app-development

Electron (formerly named Atom Shell) packages an embedded Chromium webview to produce a 'real' app. This also means that cross-browser issues are not a concern.

The author of the above article used this successfully with an Ionic app.

If you would go down this road then you would probably need to use some responsive techiques to optimize the UX on desktop.

I haven't tried this so I don't know the pros and cons of this approach but I can imagine there are cases when you just want to quickly throw together a desktop version of an app that you already have.