Native Solutions Self Support Requirements

This article outlines the required tasks and skills required by team wishing to self-support any of the Ionic Enterprise native solutions once the source is made available mid-2026. This includes the following plugins:

Capacitor:

• Auth Connect
• InTune
• Payments (Apple and Google)
• SSL Pinning
• Zebra Wedge

Cordova:

• Identity Vault
• Secure Storage

More complex products such as Portals and Federated Capacitor are covered in a separate article.

Fundamental Items

At a fundamental level, any team wishing to self-support these solutions need to build the solution and distribute the output of the build so it can be consumed by their applications. Instructions for building the solutions shall be provided by Ionic for each solution. The team that is self-supporting a solution, however, will need to implement the following specific tasks:

• Create a build process consistent with your organization's CI/CD strategies and policies.
• Distribute the build so it is accessible to your organization and your application build processes. This can be done via various means such as:
  • Create an Organization-scoped Private Package on NPM.
  • Host your own NPM registry using a tools such as ProGet.

Skills Required:

Many organizations have an infrastructure team that will either assist or perform these functions. For other organizations members of the development team will need to 

• Experience setting up a build system. Generally this requires general knowledge of tools such as shell scripting, YAML, JSON, and/or XML depending on the CI/CD pipeline being used.
• Experience setting up cloud based services and processes. This is required for setting up the private NPM registry. This will also be required if the team is using a cloud based CI/CD pipeline.

Small Scale Modifications

Small scale modifications are source code modifications that involve minimal modification to the plugin's code or configuration. Small scale modifications include:

• Updating the Capacitor-based plugins as new Capacitor versions are released. The Capacitor web site documents the steps to do this on a per-version basis.
• Minor bug fixes.
• Minor updates due to native API changes.
• Small scale feature enhancements based on existing code.

Skills Required:

• General knowledge of Android and iOS project configuration.
• General knowledge troubleshooting and debugging native code.
• General knowledge of the following programming languages:
  • For iOS: Swift, Objective-C
  • For Android: Java, Kotlin

Note: Fluency in these areas is not required.

Large Scale Modifications

On rare occasions, large scale modifications may be required. Large scale modifications require more in depth knowledge of native development than is typically required to maintain an existing plugin. Large scale modifications include:

• Net new features and enhancements.
• Modifications due to large-scale breaking change to the underlying native APIs, including but not limited to previously used APIs being deprecated and replaced by newer APIs.

Skills Required:

• In depth knowledge of Android and iOS project configuration.
• In depth knowledge of native APIs and their use.
• A working understanding of abstracting native APIs for use in a plugin.
• In depth knowledge troubleshooting and debugging native code.
• In depth knowledge of the following programming languages:
  • For iOS: Swift, Objective-C
  • For Android: Java, Kotlin

Note: unless these skills are already covered within the organization it likely makes sense to contract an outside agency to perform these types of modifications.

Resources

• Upgrading plugins for Capacitor v7 (this will change on a version by version basis, the link is only provided here as an example of the type of tasks that may be required).
• Capacitor Plugin Creation documentation.
• Capacitor Plugin Tutorial.
• Cordova plugin documentation (provided for reference, but not maintained or supported by Ionic).