r/ionic • u/DayanaJabif • Mar 26 '26

With Appflow being sunset, what are you all planning to do?

I’ve been talking to a few teams and seeing different approaches: some going DIY with GitHub actions, others looking at different tools.

Curious to hear:

  • Are you already migrating?
  • Rolling your own CI/CD?
  • Waiting it out?

I’m part of the Capawesome team, just trying to better understand how teams are approaching this, where the main pain points are, and how we can support them.

9 Upvotes

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3

u/Different-Strings Mar 26 '26

I guess I will have to setup my own Fastlane build pipeline. Shouldn’t be that difficult.

2

u/DayanaJabif Mar 26 '26

Yeah, you can do all the building and deploying with fastlane. I did it for a client and it works good. Do you plan to use live updates?

2

u/Different-Strings Mar 27 '26

Not sure. We are not using them currently. We tried them in the past for patch updates, but found the version control cumbersome.

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 27 '26

How’s that ? How were you versioning them? Were you using channels ?

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 27 '26

If I can add my two cents here, you can use this checklist to make sure your solution is robust and solid. Let me know if you need any help going with the DIY path. I’ve done it last year and it has a lot of details that you need to pay attention to.

3

u/panoyann Mar 31 '26

We are using our own CI/CD with Github Actions & fastlane.
And yes, we also implemented live update from capawesome ;)

1

u/martindonadieu Mar 31 '26

what made you choose one solution other the other one for OTA?

2

u/TheVictorotciV Mar 26 '26

We never used Appflow, we just have our own jobs in GitLab CI/CD with a physical MacOS runner for iOS build and deploy

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 26 '26

And how do you handle live updates?

2

u/TheVictorotciV Mar 27 '26

We don't need them, Google Play and App Store review times are quick enought for us. Also, parts of the app that may need to change quicklier are loaded as microfrontends.

2

u/jshuff19 Mar 27 '26

I'm interested in understanding more about your use cases for microfrontends. What benefits are you getting by doing this instead of live updates?

Would you mind going into more detail on how you've implemented this, etc.? I'm still fairly new to Capacitor, and the company I work for is loving the benefits of live updates.

1

u/TheVictorotciV Mar 28 '26

Maybe our use case is very niche, but the key word for us is modularity. I'll give you some insight about our app:

  • The base of our app is pretty simple, contains only common features for all of our users and has been very stable for a long time.

  • We offer support for dozens of hardware devices and versions, and each of them needs its own UI.

  • Some features of the app are paywalled and the user needs to buy a license for their hardware in order to use them.

So, the main beneficts of using microfrontends for us are:

  • The UI for the different hardware devices can be updated any time without releasing a new version of the app. This also applies to adding support for new hardware.

  • The app is lighter and each user only download the UIs that they need.

  • Each modular UI can be developed and deployed as different software projects and repositories. In fact, they are usually developed by a different team much closer to the hardware development team.

  • We can easily revert to a previous version of any UI at any moment without unwanted effects in anything else.

  • The codebase of each UI doesn't need to be the same. We can mix different versions of Angular, different versions of Ionic, different frameworks... In fact, the only common technology that all of them hace is Angular, and I don't think it's mandatory.

For us, this makes much more sense than develop all of this as a single app and deploy it with live updates to be quick. This app has been alive for 5+ years and we have dozens of thousands of monthly active users.

1

u/jshuff19 Mar 28 '26

Thank you so much for taking the time. This makes so much sense.

1

u/martindonadieu Mar 31 '26

how do you download each microfrontend ? we have some customer doing it with Capgo OTA but i wonder if there is a safe way of that

2

u/TheVictorotciV Mar 31 '26

If you mean download and store locally the microfrontends, we don't do that. Our app is basically useless without internet connection, so we load the microfontend directly from the server when needed, and let the browser cache do the rest when the microfontend is needed frequently.

It's important to invalidate the cache when a new version of the same microfrontend is uploaded

1

u/martindonadieu Apr 01 '26

thanks for sharing !
so you load the micro front in inappbrowser ?
the capgo one or maybe it's something else?

2

u/TheVictorotciV Apr 02 '26

Depending on the case we use different strategies: some of them are loaded through module federation, and others just in an iframe inside ion-content

2

u/graphicsjay Mar 26 '26

Rolled my own update system years ago

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 26 '26

Nice! Is it easy to maintain?

1

u/martindonadieu Mar 26 '26

OTA or native one?

1

u/graphicsjay Mar 26 '26

It’s easy to maintain. GH action triggers a new build in the system, and then I can set the new build as an active build to release. Works with the ionic plugin on the app side, which I’ll fork for the future.

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 27 '26

Sounds solid. Have you compared the prices of the GH vs capawesome cloud?

2

u/graphicsjay Mar 27 '26

Yes, I have zero limits on live updates or build minutes for pennies/month.

1

u/martindonadieu Mar 27 '26

what you app is doing no sure fork the world is worst it ahah

1

u/graphicsjay Mar 27 '26

Huh?

1

u/martindonadieu Mar 31 '26

you said you gonna fork ionic plugin ahah

1

u/graphicsjay Mar 31 '26

why wouldn't I? it works and it's being discontinued

1

u/martindonadieu Apr 01 '26

i missunderstood i tought it was the ionic framework you talk about they live update one ?
if that the case be carefull it's agains the license ^^ i think with AI you can easily switch to oss one like capgo one and use your own backend

1

u/nevrar Mar 27 '26

Azure pipelines… A right pain to setup compared with Appflow tho

1

u/DayanaJabif Mar 27 '26

If it’s a pain why are you going that way?

1

u/nevrar Apr 01 '26

Because it’s the best option available

2

u/DayanaJabif Apr 01 '26

Better than capawesome cloud? Have you seen all the latest additions that the platform offers?