Managing App Versions

Overview:

The version of an Ionic app is defined in two locations in the app configuration. The version of your app has important implications when using the Live Deploy feature.

As a best practice Ionic recommends incrementing the version in both locations whenever a change is required.

Native Version:

The version reported by the native layer of your app is defined by the version attribute in the widget node of config.xml.

<widget id="io.ionic.briandevtest" version="1.0.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/widgets" xmlns:cdv="http://cordova.apache.org/ns/1.0">

This is the version used by Live Deploy when checking native versioning requirements, and returned by plugins like cordova-plugin-app-version. This value is set in the native binary for iOS or Android native builds. Modifications to the version in config.xml will only take effect on the next native build. In Ionic Appflow, native builds are managed using the Package feature. 

Web Version:

The version reported by the Angular/web code in your app is governed by the value of the version property in package.json.

{
 "name": "test-app",
 "version": "1.0.0",
 "author": "Brionic",
 "homepage": "https://ionic.io/",
  ...
}

Modifications to the version defined in package.json take effect on the next web build. Typically web builds are run using the npm run build command with ionic-app-scripts. Apps employing Ionic Framework v1 or v4 may use a different build process.