Ionic mobile app framework was developed by Drifty Co. in 2013 and is subject to MIT License. Max Lynch, Ben Sperry, and Adam Bradley, Ionic creators, were up to develop their own framework, implementing a modern approach, with high performance in mind (mobile devices are critical to optimization and performance features due to the lack of computing power), with support for contemporary web-standards, all that after a titanic job of processing tons and tons of clients’ feedback. Releasing alpha in 2013, the team went on and May 2015 saw the Ionic 1.0 final Release.
Due to it’s been well thought through, Ionic immediately became very popular with mobile app developers, with reports stating 1.5M apps created using the framework as of the end of 2015.

"Coding in Ionic saves a lot of time and energy allowing to write the application code one time for different platforms. Thanks to the Ionic focus on HTML, CSS and JavaScript we can build applications faster, reducing the costs."

The newest version today, and the most advanced one, is Ionic 2 beta 3. It’s support of mobile platforms spreads:
• Android – 4.1+
• BlackBerry – 10
• iOS – 7+
• Windows – Universal Windows Platform (since exactly this beta 3), now it means Windows 10

The framework is distributed as an npm module, thus requiring Node.JS. The Ionic SDK provides functionality similar to native mobile SDKs, and in addition to that some tools for push notifications handling, analytic, A/B testing and others. The performance of Ionic developed apps is highly praise, much due to performance-oriented basis under Ionic’s bonnet, say AngularJS with it’s native hardware acceleration support.