Skip to content

2026

How Live Updates Are Changing Mobile App Deployment

If you've ever pushed a one-line bug fix and then waited days for app store approval, you know the frustration. Traditional mobile releases are slow, manual, and often out of sync with how fast your team actually ships code. Live updates — also known as Over-The-Air (OTA) updates — are changing that by letting Capacitor teams push web layer changes directly to users' devices, no app store submission required. In this post, we'll look at how live updates are reshaping mobile app deployment and why more teams are making the switch.

Using Environment Variables and Secrets in Capawesome Cloud Builds

When building mobile apps in the cloud, it's common to need different configuration values depending on the environment. A staging build might use a different API endpoint than a production build, or you might need to inject API keys that shouldn't be committed to your repository.

With Capawesome Cloud, you can define environments, add environment variables and secrets, and customize the build stack using reserved variables—all without changing your source code.

Announcing Open Source AI Agent Skills for Capacitor

AI coding agents are becoming an essential part of how developers build apps. But even the best agents struggle with framework-specific tasks like upgrading between Capacitor versions, configuring native plugins, or setting up cloud builds — there's just too much platform-specific knowledge involved. That's why we're releasing 7 open source agent skills that teach AI assistants how to handle the most common Capacitor tasks, from plugin setup to full platform upgrades.

How to Use CocoaPods Instead of SPM with Capacitor

Capacitor 8 made Swift Package Manager (SPM) the default dependency manager for new iOS projects. While SPM is the future of iOS dependency management, it still has some rough edges that can block real-world projects. In those cases, CocoaPods remains a solid alternative. This post covers when you might want to stick with CocoaPods and how to set it up.

How to Sign In with Okta Using Capacitor

Okta is a widely used identity platform that powers single sign-on (SSO) and user management for thousands of organizations. If you need to add Okta authentication to a Capacitor app, the OAuth plugin supports the Authorization Code flow with PKCE out of the box. In this guide, you'll learn how to register your app in Okta, implement sign-in and sign-out, manage tokens, and retrieve user profile data on Android, iOS, and web. This is also a great alternative to Ionic Auth Connect for teams looking for a lightweight, open approach.

How to Use Better Auth in Ionic and Capacitor Apps

Better Auth is an open-source, framework-agnostic authentication framework for TypeScript. Whether you're building with Ionic, Angular, React, or Vue, the Better Auth JavaScript SDK works out of the box in your Capacitor app — no special configuration needed. Since Capacitor apps are essentially web apps running in a native WebView, you can use the SDK directly for standard authentication flows. You only need Capacitor plugins when it comes to social login flows that require native functionality, like opening a browser window or using platform-specific sign-in APIs. This guide shows you how to set up mobile authentication with Better Auth in your Capacitor app using the Apple Sign-In, Google Sign-In, and OAuth plugins.

Introducing Capver: Version Management for Capacitor

If you've ever shipped a Capacitor app and had to manually update version numbers in three different files across three different platforms, you know how easy it is for things to get out of sync. Capver is an open-source CLI tool that manages your app versions across iOS, Android, and web in a single command. In this post, we'll walk you through what it does and how it works.

The App Update Delivery Guide for Capacitor

Keeping your users on the latest version of your app isn't just nice to have — it's critical for security, performance, and delivering the best experience. In this guide, you'll learn how to build a complete update delivery strategy for your Capacitor app by combining two plugins: the App Update plugin for native app store updates and the Live Update plugin for Over-The-Air (OTA) updates.