Big Ionic fanboy here, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. You absolutely need Crosswalk if you want to publish on Android. The default WebView performance blows, and is so inconsistent. We have two LG G3's with different WebView versions!
There are a few downsides though. Added complexity/possibility for bugs, and APK size.
The Crosswalk website says it should add 10-15MB to your. In our app, it's adding over 55MB to the installation size. These numbers are based on unminified JS/HTML (and I think we still have some outdated resources sitting in www/img/), but iOS: 18.0MB, Android: 78.4MB.
And then there's the additional bugs. Did you know localStorage is completely broken in the current "stable" release of Crosswalk? Once you kill/reopen your app, all storage is cleared. You'll need the latest Canary build if you want localstorage to work (and who knows what's broken in that build).
Don't judge about others based only your used hardware! There are a lot (!) people with devices out there that only have 10MB storage left and can't install a app because it's size is bigger than that. ;)
There are a few downsides though. Added complexity/possibility for bugs, and APK size.
The Crosswalk website says it should add 10-15MB to your. In our app, it's adding over 55MB to the installation size. These numbers are based on unminified JS/HTML (and I think we still have some outdated resources sitting in www/img/), but iOS: 18.0MB, Android: 78.4MB.
And then there's the additional bugs. Did you know localStorage is completely broken in the current "stable" release of Crosswalk? Once you kill/reopen your app, all storage is cleared. You'll need the latest Canary build if you want localstorage to work (and who knows what's broken in that build).