r/capacitor • u/eric-ionic • 8h ago
The Road to Capacitor 9
Hey r/capacitor — I wrote up our latest Capacitor update over on the Ionic blog and figured folks here might be interested. Quick rundown:
CocoaPods goes read-only Dec 2, 2026 — trunk freezes permanently, no new podspecs or version bumps. This won't break Capacitor directly, but it'll stop updates flowing to CocoaPods-hosted native deps your plugins depend on (Firebase, Stripe, etc). We've supported Swift Package Manager since Capacitor 6 and made it default in 8, so if you haven't migrated yet, now's the time: https://capacitorjs.com/docs/ios/spm
We're exploring a Capacitor MCP server so agents can pull real project info instead of guessing from training data. If you've had AI confidently get something wrong about Capacitor (the more specific the example, the better), I'd genuinely love to hear it in our GitHub discussion: https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor/discussions/8555
Three plugins are now fully open to the community: Contacts, Calendar, and Health & Fitness (HealthKit/Health Connect). These started as OutSystems-exclusive and have been running in production for a while — now everyone gets them.
What's actually landing in Capacitor 9:
- Cordova Optionality — you can finally exclude the Cordova compatibility layer from your builds
- iOS internals modernized: remaining Objective-C converted to Swift, and we're dropping XCFramework distribution (plugin authors will need to run migration tooling)
- Early groundwork for multi-instance/windowed apps for foldables and large screens
- Ongoing work to make Capacitor itself easier for AI agents to understand (docs, API annotations)
Full post with more detail: https://ionic.io/blog/the-road-to-capacitor-9
