Using Live Update
Ionic Appflow's Live Update feature makes it easy to deploy app updates in real time without going through a traditional app store submission process for the vast majority of business logic, UI, and style changes.
The Deploy feature works with the Ionic Appflow and requires your app is connected to a git repo in order for Appflow to access your source code and deploy new code updates..
The Live Update feature only works on binary compatible changes (HTML, CSS, JS), meaning if you rely on native code updates you must resubmit to the app store first before using Live Update.
Installation
In order to use Ionic Appflow's Live Update feature you'll need to install and configure the Live Update SDK.
Turning off Updates for Local Development
Your code will get overwritten if the local app codebase points to the same channel as a deployed Live Update build. To avoid this situation, you can turn off live updates for local development. Be sure to turn it back on before committing to source control.
Capacitor
In the capacitor.config.json
file, set the following then run npx cap sync
:
"cordova": {
"preferences": {
"DisableDeploy": "true"
}
}
Alternatively, you can change the Channel name to one currently not in use using ionic deploy configure --channel-name="NAME"
(details here). This make changes to the native project files directly (on Android, android/app/src/main/res/xml/config.xml
and on iOS, ios/App/App/config.xml
).
Cordova
Set the DisableDeploy preference to true
in the config.xml
file during local development. You can then set it back to false
before building your binary for release by either manually setting it back or using the native config feature if you're building your binaries with the native builds feature.
Advanced Usage
Want to do something sweet, like allow users to subscribe to a special Beta Channel instead of the default Production one? Do some split testing? Customize the way updates are applied (like checking every 30 minutes, or on login/logout)? Check out our detailed Live Update API Documentation!