How the Ionic community is responding to the COVID-19 crisis

As the world tries to make sense of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing social and economic crisis, developers in the Ionic community are leading the charge to inform and help the public.

In the last few weeks, we've been made aware of many efforts across the world by Ionic developers to build useful apps for mobile and web, and we want to take a second to share those.

• Natural Cycles, the #1 Birth Control App in the US & UK (and built with Ionic) is adding Coronavirus features this week
• An engineering manager at AWS on the Amplify team built a COVID-19 Tracker PWA
• USTGlobal Spain built an internal PWA to help their team stay on top of the outbreak
• Sanvello (formerly Pacifica) is making their stress and anxiety app free and will be adding Coronavirus-related features soon
• A developer in Ghana is building and demoing a public Coronavirus app
• An Indian developer built a
• A team of developers in Italy are building an open source app and looking for volunteers
• Another developer in Italy is building this app.
• A Portuguese developer built an Ionic React open source app to monitor the situation in Portugal
• A South African developer built a PWA to track the outbreak there
• A developer in Slovakia built this PWA to track cases
• On a lighter note, you can play a hand washing game to learn good practices
• Check out this beautiful and practical Pantry Storage App in development.
• This Corona Tracker PWA runs on Firebase and can be used to track your country
• Here's another open source Firebase app built with Ionic 5
• Opel launched early to help businesses impacted better communicate with their customers
• This Stencil + Ionic PWA is open source and targeted at Colombia.
• This PWA has some great graphs
• Mittmi is a video chat PWA to help folks stay connected
• Instead Of is a simple anti-goal tracker to help you focus on new goals while quarantined
• This app is using AR for home activities for children.
• The new iBond Defendant Edition(pdf) app will have Coronavirus features soon
• Help A Neighbor is a Stencil app helping people find and connect with those in need

Parting thoughts

One thing that has become crystal clear in the last few weeks is just how crucial the open web and Progressive Web Apps have been to the developers building coronavirus apps. As Apple and Google notify developers of increased app store review times and seem to be blocking and even suspending most coronavirus apps, developers are turning to the web to share their apps with the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. I'm glad that Ionic is able to facilitate this Progressive Web App-first approach and many are taking advantage of it.

If I had to guess, one of the biggest changes that will come from this period in terms of app development will be the establishment and growth of Progressive Web Apps, as they seem to be the only way to get any kind of Coronavirus app to market right now.

From all of us at Ionic, we're so proud of the time and effort the Ionic community is putting into the response and we promise you we will be standing by to help promote your work. You all make us feel like we're doing something, however small, to get information and help to the world. You are truly what makes this community so special.

If you're building something that was not mentioned here, please tweet @maxlynch and we will get this updated.