bug: cannot use angular application builder with ionic

[pkunszt]

Prerequisites

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines.
• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct.
• I have searched for existing issues that already report this problem, without success.

Ionic Framework Version

v8.x

Current Behavior

When i switch my application from

"builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:browser"

to

"builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:application"

then several ionic features stop working or work differently. Most notable is that when using modalController to display a modal, that in the header toolbar no ionic components are rendered in the given slots. Divs render, but none of ion-buttons, ion-button, ion-text, etc. does.

Menu does not show up where it should for example in the example menu starter application.

so there may be a number of things are broken in ionic when angular:application is used as the builder, i am only listing two.

Expected Behavior

no change when moving from browser to application builder.

Steps to Reproduce

• Take the starter application, menu template for example
• Make it standalone, remove polyfill.
• Add a component that has a header with a toolbar and buttons in slot primary (doing close/dismiss using modalController)
• Add a button in the center that will call a method creating a modal using the new component with modalController.create().
• When running the application, the created modal is lacking the buttons.

Code Reproduction URL

https://github.com/pkunszt/ionic-starter-with-modalcontroller-bug

Ionic Info

Ionic:

Ionic CLI : 7.2.1 (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@ionic/cli)
Ionic Framework : @ionic/angular 8.8.1
@angular-devkit/build-angular : 20.3.19
@angular-devkit/schematics : 20.3.19
@angular/cli : 20.3.19
@ionic/angular-toolkit : 12.3.0

Capacitor:

Capacitor CLI : 8.2.0
@capacitor/android : not installed
@capacitor/core : 8.2.0
@capacitor/ios : not installed

Utility:

cordova-res : 0.15.4
native-run : 2.0.3

System:

NodeJS : v24.13.0 (/opt/homebrew/Cellar/node@24/24.13.0/bin/node)
npm : 11.7.0
OS : macOS Tahoe 26.2

Additional Information

I have not checked other omissions from ionic using application compilation.
The problem is that i have a complex app that does not seem to compile using browser compilation, as a dependency just gives an infinite recursion on compile (stack overflow) with the latest browser compiler from angular. So this will be a problem very soon.