Today we’re thrilled to announce that Capacitor 3 is ready for public beta! This release includes a lot of exciting new features, including:
Individual Packages for APIs
The Core APIs provided by Capacitor have received a lot of new attention with V3. Instead of including all the plugins in the Core API, we’ve split out the plugins into their own packages. This means faster startup times and more control over required permissions.
Run your project from the CLI
A highly requested feature, you can now run your projects directly from the command line with a brand new run command. Say goodbye to context switching!
Dynamic Project Configuration
We’ve added support for having a Capacitor config file that is written in TypeScript! This means getting auto-completion for your config values, as well as the ability to support multiple build environments such as prod/dev/staging.
This is pretty great. I am waiting for v3 to launch officially before I dump cordova. Just a suggestion. Please have max capability by official plugins else capacitor will be another cordova with outdated community plugins. Many of the devs using ionic do not have obj c or java knowledge. Granted we can use cordova plugins but not all are supported.
I second the comment above - looks promising, well done everyone.
Genuine question: I see there are plugins for action-sheet, dialog etc.
I don’t understand why I would use the Ionic Web Component version of these if there are straightforward APIs for the native ones now built in?
I mean, if I don’t have to approximate the UI and can instead use the native UI where possible, isn’t that the end-goal?
I guess if you’re publishing to the web I can see why, but most people are using the framework for installed apps, not desktop web. Unless I’m mistaken.
Looks like some great progress, thanks for sharing the update.
I noticed that the background task API doesn’t appear to be included in the upcoming NPM packages. In the current documentation it states that it would “soon” be able to support periodic background fetch operations.
Is there planned support for this in 3.0? Has it been removed?
edit: Nevermind, I see in the updating instructions the explanation. Hoping we’ll get background fetching soon as it’s extremely helpful for minimizing startup times
Question: For dynamic project configuration, does this allow for more pulling in different .plist or google-services files based on build type (dev, stage, prod) or should we still be using hooks for this?
Yep, plugins and helping to build a community around plugins are definitely a focus for us in 2021. That’s one of the reasons we started the Capacitor Community org on GitHub.
Right now the feature is limited to dynamically changing the generated configuration options for Capacitor itself. Stay tuned, we want to write guides and possibly provide tooling for managing build types in the native projects.
I wrote about that a little bit here. It’s plausible to see a build command sometime in the future, but I think we can provide a lot more value in other areas at the moment.
With this update one of the community plugins for Google Auth is no longer working on my end GitHub - CodetrixStudio/CapacitorGoogleAuth: Capacitor plugin for Google Auth. Lightweight & no dependencies. … should I wait for community plugin authors to update the import implementation of this plugin or is there a new notation that I need to use to get this plugin supported in the Capacitor 3.0 Beta I have upgrade to because Google Sign in is IMPERATIVE to my apps authentication process.
