By the end of this book, we will be building apps that are ready to be deployed on to the device. Since Cordova takes HTML, CSS, and JS code as input and generates a platform-specific installer, you need to have the build environments available on your machine.
Note
Android users can follow the instructions on the Android Platform Guide at http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/edge/guide_platforms_android_index.md.html#Android%20Platform%20Guide to set up SDK on your local machine.
iOS users can follow the instructions from the iOS Platform Guide at http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/edge/guide_platforms_ios_index.md.html#iOS%20Platform%20Guide to set up SDK on your local machine.
You would need an OSX environment to develop iOS apps.
As of today, Ionic supports only Android 4.0+ (although, it works on 2.3 as well) and iOS 6+ mobile platforms. But Cordova supports a few more.
Note
You can check out the other supported platforms here: http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/edge/guide_platforms_index...