Hello everybody,
so we are developing a completely new hybrid app in our company. For our prototype we did not use Ionic at all so far. What we did instead is that our mobile team built a native wrapper in which we are simply displaying the deployed web app through a WebView. One of our main goals is to minimize the App Stores submissions and approvals when doing the web UI changes. I’m assuming that with this approach we can achieve that goal but there are couple of downsides that I noticed.
First is that we have to maintain three different projects/teams (Web, Android, iOS) and write our required native functionality separately (fingerprint authentication, barcode scanner and push notifications).
The other thing, more specific to Apple is that (from Apple guidelines) “Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website.” I’m concerned that we might run into troubles when submitting to Apple’s app store because with this approach we are essentially pulling the main content/UI from our external website, rather than the UI being bundled with the native app.
With that said we are now looking more into Ionic’s Capacitor and Appflow. The first thing that I’m curious about is Live app updates. In our prototype it’s quite straightforward, we redeploy the Web app and the UI is updated.
Can someone briefly explain how do these Live app updates work if Capacitor bundles the UI with the native app?
Also is there any simple way to implement these Live app updates without the help of Ionic’s Appflow?
We do have our CI/CD setup in Azure (company preference), does this mean that we would have to move our CI/CD to Appflow?
I’m quite new to Capacitor and Hybrid app development so any answers, suggestions, pros & cons regarding my questions or observations are much appreciated.
Thank you!
Erik.