Drifty

Drifty, commonly referred to as Drifty Co., was a technology company best known for creating the Ionic Framework, an open-source UI toolkit for building cross-platform mobile applications with web technologies. The company emerged in the early 2010s to support the Ionic ecosystem, aiming to simplify mobile app development by letting developers write code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and deploy it to multiple platforms via wrappers such as Cordova.

The Ionic Framework gained widespread adoption for its component library, design language, and tooling, which helped popularize hybrid mobile development. Drifty expanded its offerings to include development tools, training, and commercial services around Ionic-based projects. As the ecosystem grew, the corporate focus increasingly centered on the Ionic brand, and the Drifty branding gradually faded from products and communications.

In later years, Ionic evolved beyond its original Angular-based framework, adding support for other front-end frameworks and introducing modern tooling such as Capacitor, a native runtime designed to work with Ionic apps. The Drifty entity is remembered primarily as the originator of the Ionic ecosystem, with Ionic continuing as the principal brand and project name.

Impact and legacy: Drifty’s work contributed to the broader adoption of web technologies for native-like mobile experiences and helped shape the landscape of hybrid mobile app development. The Ionic Framework remains a widely used open-source project, with ongoing development and a large community of contributors and users.