Recently I found a way to take php and put it directly into ionic by changing the extension to .php and in the routes change the extension to .php so it only works on a installed server I thought it would work and it show the php on the mobile device so I thought that I could change index.html to index.php and I get a error:
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\xampp2\htdocs\myApp\www\index.html'
So is there a way to change index.html to index.php
Your mobile device isn't running PHP, PHP is a server-side language and Ionic is used to build client-side apps using Javascript. Theoretically you could build an app in Ionic with PHP interspersed and deploy it to a LAMP server and it would run in a web browser but that kind of defeats the purpose of Ionic/hybrid app architecture and I would not recommend it.