Capacitor 243,123 descends from the project Cordova teaches. Nitobi wrote PhoneGap at iPhoneDevCamp in August 2008; Adobe bought Nitobi in October 2011 and gave the code to Apache, where it became Cordova 129 . The Ionic Framework 20,753 , released in 2013 by Drifty Co. (Max Lynch, Ben Sperry and Adam Bradley), ran on Cordova for its first five years, depending on layers the team did not control: the global CLI, the platforms/ folder regenerated from config.xml, and plugin code copied in at build time. Capacitor was its answer. Announcing 1.0, Max Lynch wrote that "in spirit, Capacitor and Cordova are very similar," and made running Cordova plugins "out of the box" a design goal, which is why most still install in a Capacitor project (Migrating from Cordova).
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Aug 2008 | Nitobi writes PhoneGap |
| Oct 2011 | Adobe buys Nitobi; the code becomes Apache Cordova |
| 22 May 2019 | Capacitor 1.0 |
| Aug 2020 | Adobe announces the end of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build |
| Nov 2022 | OutSystems 37,408 acquires Ionic |
| 11 Feb 2025 | Ionic stops selling Appflow 53,110 and its other paid products |
The last row matters if you follow older tutorials. Appflow, Identity Vault, Auth Connect and Secure Storage reach end of life on 31 December 2027; from 1 October 2026 Appflow accepts no new apps or plan changes, and on 22 September 2026 Ionic named Capawesome 178,914 the migration partner. Ionic Framework and Capacitor, in Ionic's words, "will remain free and open source." Live Updates and CI/CD and Secure Storage cover the replacements.