Capacitor Expert

Comprehensive reference for building cross-platform apps with Capacitor. Covers architecture, CLI, plugins, framework integration, best practices, and Capawesome Cloud.

Core Concepts

Capacitor is a cross-platform native runtime for building web apps that run natively on iOS, Android, and the web. The web app runs in a native WebView, and Capacitor provides a bridge to native APIs via plugins.

Architecture

A Capacitor app has three layers:

1. Web layer -- HTML/CSS/JS app running inside a native WebView (WKWebView on iOS, Android System WebView on Android).
2. Native bridge -- Serializes JS plugin calls, routes them to native code, and returns results as Promises.
3. Native layer -- Swift/ObjC (iOS) and Kotlin/Java (Android) code implementing native functionality.

Data passed across the bridge must be JSON-serializable. Pass files as paths, not base64.

Project Structure