PhoneGap was built by Nitobi Software at iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco in 2008. Adobe bought Nitobi in 2011 and donated the code to the Apache Software Foundation, where it was proposed as "Callback" and renamed Cordova 129 . PhoneGap then became Adobe's distribution of Cordova, plus PhoneGap Build, a cloud compiler.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Aug 2008 | Nitobi creates PhoneGap |
| Oct 2011 | Adobe acquires Nitobi; the code goes to Apache |
| Oct 2012 | Cordova becomes a top-level Apache project |
| May 2019 | Ionic 20,753 releases Capacitor 1.0 |
| Aug 2020 | Adobe announces the end of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build |
| Nov 2025 | Cordova CLI 13.0.0 |
After Adobe's announcement, the Cordova team stated that Cordova was "still active and maintained", and surviving PhoneGap apps now run on plain Cordova. Capacitor (github.com/ionic-team/capacitor (https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor 16,741 ), MIT) is the Ionic team's successor to Cordova. It keeps WebView plus plugins and runs most Cordova plugins, but you commit and edit its native projects instead of regenerating them. Over the 30 days to 21 September 2026, npm 2,036 counted 211,022 downloads of cordova and 15,904,679 of @capacitor/core. Cordova Versus Capacitor compares them; Capacitor migrates an app.