Originally published at: https://ionic.io/blog/announcing-capacitor-5-beta
Capacitor, our cross-platform native runtime, is used by thousands of development teams worldwide to build better digital experiences. Today, we’re excited to bring you the latest iteration – Capacitor 5.0 (beta)! This latest version of Capacitor brings with it a number of exciting improvements, from bug fixes to support for the latest policy changes for…
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My understanding is that a new Capacitor version is released at the same time as Ionic. So we have version 7 of Ionic for version 5 of Capacitor. And you have multiple plugins that do 2.x for Capacitor 4.x, 1.x for Capacitor 3.x and so on…
THIS IS JUST A GIANT MESS. And Ionic corporation seems to be a specialist about that. There is some good code in this framework but when you read the forums, it’s just chaos of which bug in this version but not that one and that hack/solution applies to this old version.
Understand that everybody is not an Ionic expert tracking the latest release with its set of compatibility and issue. You are creating confusion among your users. More confusion, less adoption.
Bump Capacitor version to match Ionic version. Force the plugins writers to do it too. Adopt standardization of release version. And much clearer for users, call your version number the year of release. That would become Ionic and Capacitor 2023 (or if you do multiple per year, call it 2023-Q2).
You give the feeling you don’t really think about your users.
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@gregoireg Appreciate the feedback, we will certainly take it into consideration. Ionic and Capacitor are on separate releases because they are two independent projects. While you use Ionic with Capacitor, many Capacitor developers don’t use Ionic. We also follow semver closely for each project, and if an update requires a breaking change in Capacitor, we release a new major version, and vice versa. Locking the versions of the two projects could break that semantic versioning promise.
We also have to ship major updates frequently (yearly or multiple times per year) since iOS and Android are a moving target and Apple and Google have frequent breaking changes and upgrades required for developers on those platforms.
Regardless, we always want to help make our projects and versioning easier to understand, so your feedback is appreciated.
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That’s exactly my point.
There is good code in the Ionic products galaxy. No doubt about that. And you feel the necessity to do multiple releases: that’s fine. Plus it’s a good thing that the CEO reads the forums 
You need to think more about your developers. It’s too messy: too many versions with non-coherent release numbers for different products and on different schedule pattern. And I even don’t talk about compatibility issues. And there are all the plugins.
No need of an infinite thread here ; I think I made my point. To my mind, your CTO needs to impose an authoritarian release planning and strategy.
Thank you for your hard work.
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Thank you for the new release.
In my mind, the big issue is plugins compatibility - that’s the big mess, less so the ionic/capacitor versioning policy and numbering.
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Following this post as I find it interesting.