For most Cordova apps, the day-to-day changes — a copy fix, a styling tweak, a JavaScript bug — live entirely in the web assets. Yet shipping one traditionally means rebuilding the native binary, resubmitting to the App Store and Google Play, and waiting out review before anyone sees it.
Live updates remove that round trip. You publish a new web bundle, and devices download and apply it on their next launch — usually within minutes, with no store submission in the loop. This guide walks through how that works in a Cordova app, the decisions that shape your setup, and a working example you can clone today.
> This post is also available on the discussed below — it's open source.
What is a live update?
A Cordova app has two layers. The native layer is the compiled binary from the store — the WebView, the plugins, the platform glue. The web layer is everything inside that WebView: your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and assets.
A live update is an over-the-air (OTA) update of the web layer only. The native binary stays untouched. Because nothing native changes, you don't need an app review and users don't have to do anything.
The one rule that matters: you can only update what already exists in the native binary. A copy change, a CSS tweak, a web framework upgrade — all fine. Adding or upgrading a Cordova plugin, or anything touching native code, AndroidManifest.xml, or Info.plist — that still needs a real store release.
A nice detail: it works with the stock WebView
If you're coming from Ionic Appflow, here's a welcome difference. The is a small, dependency-free Cordova app that shows the plugin downloading and applying an OTA bundle on a real device. Clone it, point it at your own Capawesome Cloud app, and watch an update land before wiring up anything in your own codebase.
If you're migrating off Appflow, the concepts map closely — channels stay channels, and the background/none strategies have direct equivalents. The full guide, including the migration path, is on the Capawesome blog.
Questions or feedback? I'd genuinely like to hear how your Cordova OTA setup goes — drop a comment.
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