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external found.com/engineering 2024-XX-XX

Migrating from Cordova to Capacitor

A cleaner native layer for our hybrid app

I led this migration at Found and wrote most of the post myself.

We had a hybrid mobile app shelled around a web view. The Cordova layer underneath had served us well for years but had started to creak — plugin maintenance was a tax, build tooling was opaque, and a couple of long-running issues had no clear path to resolution. Capacitor offered a cleaner plugin model, modern build tooling, and a smaller surface area we could reason about.

The piece walks through the migration mechanics: how we approached plugin parity, the tooling swaps, what broke and what didn't, and the post-migration delta. It's a practical writeup, not a polemic — Cordova was fine, Capacitor was just a better fit for where we were going.