Today at the first ever official Ioniconf, we unveiled a number of exciting updates to Capacitor and the Capacitor community.

In no particular order, we announced:

The conference kicks off a new era for Capacitor and for Ionic, the company behind Capacitor.

If you’d like to see the announcements live, the keynote (along with the rest of the conference) is now up.

Capacitor opening up

One of the biggest announcements of the day was that Capacitor will be opening up to embrace every modern web app technology and ecosystem.

While technically Capacitor has worked with any modern web framework and UI library, it was not always clear that Capacitor could be used without Ionic Framework, and the project certainly did not embrace outside frameworks.

With this change, expect to see a lot more Capacitor apps running Angular Material, Tailwind, Material UI, and even Bootstrap. Expect to see content, tutorials, examples, and more on non-Ionic Framework options from the Capacitor team.

The new Capacitor mission is to help all web developers build cross-platform apps with their web development skills.

Capacitor Community

One of the biggest challenges with an ecosystem like Capacitor (and like any other popular open source ecosystem) is making sure the community can fill in all the gaps left by the core team with plugins, add-ons, and more.

Yesterday, web announced a new Capacitor Community GitHub org and npm scope to curate the best community-supported Capacitor plugins and encourage more developers to build plugins.

To start, we have a number of great plugins and many are in development. Check out the Http, Contacts, and Apple Sign In plugins. We’ve also started moving the Electron platform to the community org.

Every project in the Capacitor Community is community maintained and supported, so the Capacitor core team will not be able to provide any kind of community support to any project in here. However, the team is facilitating and in communication with all maintainers.

Capacitor Elements

We announced Capacitor Elements, an upcoming project to bring operating-system level UI experiences to every Capacitor app, regardless of the web framework or UI library an app uses.

These components will be powered by Ionic Framework under the hood, but will be fully compatible and not conflict with any modern UI library.

The goal is to provide the same types of utility APIs that the operating system would to a traditional native developer, such as Action Sheets, Bottom Drawers, Alerts, Modals, Cameras, and more.

This makes a Capacitor app feel native right away regardless of whether the app framework provides these controls.

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

Deploy to App Store for Capacitor

We announced that Deploy to App Store, a powerful new feature available in Ionic’s DevOps service Appflow that enables developers to push builds to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, is now available to all paid Appflow plans.

This feature is a significant boost to teams frustrated with the manual and tedious app store publishing process, or for teams that wish to automate app store submission as part of their CI/CD pipeline.

Appflow now fully supports Capacitor, and Capacitor is quickly becoming the preferred native runtime when using Appflow.

Updated Site, Domain, and Docs

We’ve updated the Capacitor site and moved to a new domain (capacitorjs.com) and Twitter handle (@capacitorjs).

We also rolled out updated documentation as we embark on a documentation overhaul.

Stay tuned

Capacitor is quickly becoming the focal point of Ionic’s open source offering, and we’re investing heavily in it. The team itself has grown in the last few weeks and we are truly just getting started on our mission to enable all web developers to build cross-platform apps for the app store and the web.

Stay tuned for a ton more Capacitor updates in the coming months!