One of the most common questions we get is: "What's the difference between using Live Updates and server.url in Capacitor?"
Many developers use the server.url configuration option to load their app's web content from a remote server in production — even though it was never designed for that.
In this post, we'll break down what each approach does, how they compare, and why Live Updates are the better choice for production apps.
If you've ever hit a cryptic code signing error in Xcode and spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong, you're not alone. iOS code signing is one of the most confusing parts of iOS development, especially for developers coming from web or Android backgrounds. The good news is that once you understand the pieces and how they fit together, it all starts to make sense.
In this guide, you'll learn what certificates and provisioning profiles are, how they work together, and which combinations you need for each type of build.
Capacitor 8 now supports Swift Package Manager (SPM) package traits, bringing feature-flag-like capabilities to your iOS plugin dependencies. If you've ever needed to toggle an optional dependency — like enabling SQLCipher encryption for a SQLite plugin — you can now do it directly from your Capacitor config. This was previously only possible with CocoaPods subspecs, and since SPM is the default package manager in Capacitor, this fills an important gap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.