Capacitor 8.5 Released

For quite some time, a warning has been sitting in your Xcode console when building Capacitor apps — the one about your app not adopting the UIScene lifecycle, and how that will become a requirement in a future version. Starting with iOS 27, apps built against the latest SDK have to adopt scenes.

While UIScene adoption has been on our radar as part of Capacitor 9, we’ve heard the community and realized that we couldn’t hold off on adopting UIScene as you (rightfully) want to start testing your apps on the latest Xcode SDKs and iOS betas. 

To address this we’ve released Capacitor 8.5, a breaking minor that adopts UIScene, along with documentation and tooling to help migrate existing apps. Changes in this version are iOS only, and for most apps the migration is one CLI command.

Update now, while iOS 27 is still in beta

First, the scope of Capacitor 8.5: this only affects apps built with Xcode 27. Published apps keep running on iOS 27, and so will anything you build with Xcode 26. Nothing breaks in the App Store when iOS 27 ships.

But until you adopt scenes, Xcode 27 is closed to you, and that’s the real issue Capacitor 8.5 addresses. You can’t build against the new SDK, so you can’t find out what else has changed with your app. Migrate now and you have the whole beta to work through anything that needs addressing. Wait, and you’ll find issues alongside everyone else with no runway.

Updating to Capacitor 8.5

For most projects, the migration CLI command is enough:

npm i -D @capacitor/cli@latest
npx cap migrate

The migrator adds what your project needs and wires it into the iOS project. If it can’t do that safely, it stops and tells you why. For those cases, use the capacitor-uiscene-migrator skill added to our list of Capacitor Skills that walks the manual path with your coding agent.

As we would for a major release, we’ve published a upgrade guide covering every change in detail.

Where this is heading

If you’ve been following updates to iOS and Android’s SDKs, it’s very clear that the future isn’t single full-screen apps —screens fold, apps get resized, two apps sit side-by-side. 

Capacitor 9 is the first phase of that work: removing the single-window assumption so your app can be folded or resized, etc. UIScene adoption was always part of that. Capacitor 8.5 is us pulling that piece forward so you aren’t blocked in the meantime.

We’d like to thank the community for their continued support of Capacitor. A special thanks is in order for everyone who filed, commented, and shared workarounds while we caught up. 

Update today and keep your iOS 27 testing moving. Then keep an eye out for Capacitor 9 towards the end of the year — you’ll have already done the first part.