I’ve been writing cross platform apps for many years now and a huge change that I don’t think people have noticed or understand is Cordova vs Capacitor. I put up with Cordova but always felt like I was on the edge of my builds breaking. The process to create the native project in the fly was always very inconsistent in my experience. The first debugging step for a failed Cordova app build was “try it again?”, that’s a horrible way to develop/live.
Then comes along Capacitor. I assumed “Ok, it’s just the newer version of Cordova”, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Things that were a huge pain with Cordova (building the native project from scratch, any changes to the native project for things like capabilities/permissions, the version of Google apis conflicting, etc) are gone. You now commit the Xcode and Android Studio projects to your source tree. This makes builds so much easier (throw fastlane into the mix and you’ve got something really awesome) and makes writing native code super easy.
I didn’t think I’d ever want to write native code for a cross platform app but Capacitor makes it stupid-simple to drop down to native code whenever you want. No more packaging your code in a plug-in (if you don’t want to at least), just add a class with the right annotations or extending the right class and you are calling native code from JS in no time at all. Native used to be scary or hard to work with in Cordova, that’s no longer the case in Capacitor. It gives me a ton of freedom and finally makes me feel in control of my builds and my app as a whole.
If you’ve slept on Capacitor I urge you to give it a shot, it’s quite nice to work with and fixes all the major pain points I’ve had over the years with Cordova.
Then comes along Capacitor. I assumed “Ok, it’s just the newer version of Cordova”, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Things that were a huge pain with Cordova (building the native project from scratch, any changes to the native project for things like capabilities/permissions, the version of Google apis conflicting, etc) are gone. You now commit the Xcode and Android Studio projects to your source tree. This makes builds so much easier (throw fastlane into the mix and you’ve got something really awesome) and makes writing native code super easy.
I didn’t think I’d ever want to write native code for a cross platform app but Capacitor makes it stupid-simple to drop down to native code whenever you want. No more packaging your code in a plug-in (if you don’t want to at least), just add a class with the right annotations or extending the right class and you are calling native code from JS in no time at all. Native used to be scary or hard to work with in Cordova, that’s no longer the case in Capacitor. It gives me a ton of freedom and finally makes me feel in control of my builds and my app as a whole.
If you’ve slept on Capacitor I urge you to give it a shot, it’s quite nice to work with and fixes all the major pain points I’ve had over the years with Cordova.