[vially]

This was happening in an Ionic 4 project which was already using the stock tooling of the framework (Angular CLI). But I remember it being worse in Ionic 3 with its custom tooling, so overall things do seem to be improving with time.

My findings at that time (it was a while ago) seem to match exactly the slowdowns described in this issue [1]. Just importing the IonicModule in a new Angular project (without actually using any Ionic component) made the dev server build times jump from around 200 ms to a couple of seconds. And the situation only seemed to get worse as more Ionic features were being added to the app.

Just to make it clear, I understand that this is an open-source project and I don't expect anyone to fix my issues. And I'm also very grateful to you and the Ionic team for giving us Capacitor which is such a big improvement from Cordova.

So I don't like being all negative in here. But I did encounter a fair share of issues with Ionic and I'm only sharing my experience here as just another data-point in case it helps someone make a well-informed decision.

And I have to say, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Ionic in general did make me question my own abilities several times. Maybe I just don't "get it". I still haven't ruled that out as a possibility.

[1] - https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/issues/17902

[yesimahuman]

Thanks for the info. I do think the choice of Angular here is significant. Angular builds have historically been very heavy. Later versions have sped things up and Ionic apps have gained from that. I haven’t seen slow builds in React, for example.