Native Builds and Live Updates

For current customers, we have begun a multi-year process of discontinuing maintenance and support services for Ionic Appflow. During this process, we will continue to keep Appflow up-to-date with support for all latest dependencies.

All Appflow features and services will be sunset effective December 31, 2027. By this time, you should have migrated to alternative services for Native Builds and Live Update services. Any applications still relying on Appflow infrastructure at this time may experience build pipeline failures and/or live update failures resulting in whitescreens.

Appflow Native Build Alternatives

Alternatives to Appflow native builds include:

• Bitrise - Full CI/CD tooling that encompasses testing, builds, and native app store deployments. Does not provide out-of-the-box support for Capacitor, but Bitrise pipelines can be configured to support Capacitor applications.
• CodeMagic - Provides customizable pipelines that support testing, builds, and native app store deployments. Offers official documentation for building a Capacitor application.
• Volt Builder - Offers native builds and releases with out-of-the-box support for Capacitor and Cordova.

	Bitrise	VoltBuilder	CodeMagic
Native builds + releases	Yes	Yes	Yes
Out-of-the-box Capacitor support	No, but can be configured to support it by following an unofficial guide.	Yes	No, but can be configured to support it by following an official guide.
Integrates with your git repository	Yes, allows you to build from commits.	No, requires you to upload your project, either using the web UI or API.	Yes, allows you to build from commits.
CLI for triggering builds/deployments	Yes	No, but offers an API.	Yes

Live update alternatives

Alternatives to Live Updates include:

• Capawesome - Offers similar functionality to the @capacitor/live-updates service, which includes channel management, differential download support, code signing, and manual update logic.
• Capgo - Offers similar functionality to the @capacitor/live-updates service, including channel management, code signing, and manual update logic.

	Capawesome	Capgo
Capacitor-compatible live updates plugin	Yes	Yes
Separate live update channels	Yes	Yes
Differential updates	Yes	Yes
CLI for triggering deployments	Yes	Yes

Still have questions? Please reach out to the Ionic Support team by creating a ticket or emailing [e-mail].