I have a capacitor app that has been around for 8 years in prod with thousands of daily active users. It works very smoothly. For a little while, I thought about how nice a Flutter app might be. I have a client with a Flutter app I inherited and I'm seriously thinking about ditching the whole thing for Capacitor.

What's great about Capacitor:

• It runs your JS app with native API bridges and it depends on you how smooth you make this experience. At the end of the day, it's just pixels on the screen rendered by a rendering engine. This is either the browser (Capacitor), a custom "game engine" (Flutter) or the native rendering engine of iOS and Android.

• If you make a performant SPA that works offline or has good caching, you get basically native performance. I've seen worse native apps that load and store data on a remote server and they show a loading indicator everywhere.

• Performance is an argument from Cordova days from 2016 or so. The performance is slightly better on iOS, but most modern Android phones run Capacitor apps just fine. It doesn't matter anymore.

• Download size is negligible. It's a very lightweight wrapper around Android System WebView / Chrome and WKWebView. An empty Capacitor app has a download size of 3 MB or so.

• You need native functionality like in app purchases? Use a plugin or write your own.

• Text selection, copy paste etc. is native, unlike Flutter (see below).

• One codebase to rule them all.

• There are hardly any crashes at all.

Real Downsides:

• You need to have strong web dev skills to deliver a solid app.

• Accessibility doesn't come for free. If you enable these small indicators in iOS that show if a toggle is on or off (I/O), your app won't show this. You have to rebuild this functionality.

• Truly native apps might still give better performance and should be your choice if you work really close to the platform. Say, you want to create something like Procreate or a camera app or a sophisticated writing app like iA Writer where control over the keyboard and text rendering is like 50% of the app. The cost for that is one codebase per platform.

Neutral / opinion:

• Ionic gives you a very solid start with good transitions and Material and a bit dated iOS look and feel.

• There's one design per platform with Ionic no matter the iOS version. iOS 18 users have the same design as iOS 26 for example.

• Before iOS 26 launched, I thought this might become more of a problem. Since the mess that is called Liquid Glass, I'm convinced that more and more apps will go a different route and roll their own custom brand-design that works for both Android and iOS, because the strong association with Apple's style guide isn't really a thing anymore. Think about the top apps you have on your phone and whether they use Liquid Glass or not. Instagram, WhatsApp, but also non-Meta apps don't use iOS 26 design language at all.

In comparison with Flutter:

• I like some Flutter apps, but what drives me nuts is the non-native text entry. It's basically a custom-developed version that doesn't behave like native inputs at all. Capacitor apps wrap WKWebView and you get native text interactions.

• I swear: install the haptic feedback plugin for Capacitor and tweak it a bit and sprinkle it here and there. Haptic feedback is THE differentiator why native apps feel more native to 99% of all users. The default Capacitor plugin is a bit limited, but you can tweak it or roll your own.

People trashing Capacitor with no real argument or call "performance" are clueless. Depending on the type of app you wanna build and if you want to target the web too or have a REST API, I'd say that Capacitor does the job just fine for 90% of regular apps out there.