Capacitor, our cross-platform native runtime for web apps, continues to grow rapidly in 2025, now nearing one million downloads per week and reaching a new weekly high of nearly 930,000 downloads in mid-November.

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Capacitor 8 — the latest step forward in our ongoing effort to make building high-quality native experiences with web technologies simpler, more modern, and more consistent across platforms.

What’s New in Capacitor 8

SPM by default on iOS

Capacitor 8 adopts Swift Package Manager (SPM) as the default dependency manager for new iOS projects, replacing CocoaPods for new setups.

Existing CocoaPods-based projects will continue to work. While CocoaPods is still supported today, the iOS ecosystem is steadily moving toward SPM as the preferred package manager.

Learn more about SPM and iOS package management in Mark Anderson’s blog post: Swift Package Manager and Capacitor.

Android Edge-to-Edge support

Modern Android devices favor immersive, full-screen layouts. Capacitor 8 introduces built-in edge-to-edge support through a new internal SystemBars plugin that takes care of status and navigation bar appearance and insets automatically, so your layout always looks right on modern Android devices.

This same functionality powers the new public SystemBars API which gives developers access to fine-grained control when it’s needed. If you still need to support older versions that rely on @capacitor/status-bar, the two can be used together — Capacitor automatically applies the correct behavior based on the device’s Android version.

Updating to Capacitor 8

Capacitor 8 continues our ongoing modernization of the native layer across both iOS and Android, keeping your projects aligned with the latest platform standards.

When you’re ready to update, the Capacitor 8 Update Guide walks through the recommended upgrade path and any changes to be aware of.

Thank You!

A huge thank-you to the Capacitor team for their hard work and care in shaping this release, and to all of our community contributors whose bug reports, fixes, and feedback help us keep improving with each version. And of course, thank you to the broader Capacitor community for continuing to invest in and believe in the project. We’re excited to keep building the future of cross-platform development together.