Capacitor Month: livestreams, plugins, and avocados – oh my!

May marked Capacitor’s 4th birthday, so to celebrate – we cranked out tons of awesome Capacitor content. From livestream tutorials to community features, it was a birthday party to remember. Here’s what you may have missed:

The past, present, and future of Capacitor

We kicked off the celebration with a stroll down memory lane with CEO and co-founder Max, who explained to us how the name Capacitor came to be. (Hint: it involves avocados 🥑)

Co-founder Ben Sperry also walked us through how he came up with Capacitor’s visual identity and branding. He even takes us through some of the older iterations and explains how we got the logo we know and love today.

In looking toward the future, we announced Capacitor v5, which is packed with features and enhancements to make for an even smoother developer experience. We also reintroduced Federated Capacitor (formerly known as Portals for Capacitor) for those who have large teams and complex applications. In short, Federated Capacitor empowers development teams to work at their own pace on their designated features without needing to worry about other teams’ speed or schedules.

Learning to build with Capacitor

When you build with Capacitor, the possibilities are endless – and our community showed us just that. Ionic Developer Expert Robin Genz wrote up a super easy-to-follow tutorial about how quickly and easily a new plugin can be developed and integrated into your Capacitor app. Ionic’s Logan Brade also took us through how to build a new Capacitor media plugin, and even hosted a livestream to walk through it in real-time. 

We announced the integration of Kapa.ai into our Discord server, making it easier than ever to get help whenever you need it. Whether you’re just starting to build with Capacitor or are a seasoned professional, Kapa is great for answering almost any questions. 

Throughout the month we also hosted a number of Discord Days, where our engineers hung out on Discord live to answer your questions as they came up. Between the Discord server and our forum, community members from all over the world are eager and ready to lend a helping hand as you build with Capacitor. 

It takes a village

We say it time and time again – Capacitor is made infinitely better by the enthusiastic community behind it. We highlighted a few of those community members throughout the month (and they’re just the tip of the iceberg)! 

The SQLite plugin is a community-maintained plugin utilized by countless apps. We have Quéau Jean Pierre to thank for its creation and are grateful to everyone who helps maintain it.

Aaron Saunders is a long-time community member that continues to make awesome educational content around how developers can leverage Capacitor in different ways. 

Simon Grimm, another Ionic Developer Expert and founder of Ionic Academy, has created lots of dedicated courses for others to learn from. 

No matter what you’re trying to build or how you want to build it – there’s a way to make it better with Capacitor, and the community can help. 

Fantastic tools and where to find them

Our team has been hard at work improving Capacitor, particularly in developing new plugins that will make development even smoother. In expanding our presence in the mobile app security landscape, we built an SSL pinning plugin that helps defend apps from man-in-the-middle attacks. 

But we haven’t just focused on enterprise – we’re still heavily focused on the community. Those who joined our livestream got a sneak peek at the latest OSS plugin coming to Capacitor. 👀 We understand that some of the most critical app features need the ability to run while the app is in the background, and soon, they’ll be able to do just that! 

Amazing plugins are no good if you can’t find them, so we’re thrilled to announce the new and improved Plugin Registry. Now, no matter what problem you’re trying to solve, you can easily find the perfect plugin for it. 

We’re elated to see the continued growth of both Capacitor and the community around it. With 1.5 million monthly installs (and growing), we can’t wait to see what the future holds. We’re just getting started. 🚀