On February 11, 2025, Ionic announced that it had discontinued new customer sales for all its commercial products and would begin a multi-year process of winding down their maintenance and support. Eighteen months later, we spend a good portion of our client conversations explaining what that does and does not mean. This post is that explanation.
What was announced
From Ionic's announcement:
- New sales ended for Appflow, Identity Vault, Auth Connect, Secure Storage, Portals, and all other paid components
- Appflow users keep access through December 31, 2027
- Enterprise customers are being offered an option for continued use and self-service maintenance of the commercially licensed software, with Ionic contacting existing customers directly about eligibility
- The open-source products — Ionic Framework and Capacitor — continue to be supported and maintained as central pieces of OutSystems' mobile stack
Product by product
Appflow (builds, live updates, store deploys). Hard end date. The replacements are mature and, for most teams, better: GitHub Actions, Codemagic, or Bitrise for native builds; fastlane for signing and store submission; Capgo or Capawesome Cloud for live updates. This is a DevOps migration with a known shape — see our 2027 migration calendar.
Identity Vault (biometric-protected secure storage of tokens). No shutdown date for licensed use, but no new licences and a shrinking support horizon. Replacements: the platform keychain/keystore via Capacitor plugins such as the community secure-storage plugins, combined with the OS biometric APIs. The work is mainly in reproducing Identity Vault's lock/unlock lifecycle rules in your own auth layer, which we have done for several clients.
Auth Connect (OAuth/OIDC with native browser flows). Replace with a standards-based OIDC client and Capacitor's browser and app-URL plugins for the PKCE redirect. Auth0, Okta, Entra ID, Cognito, and Firebase Auth all publish current guidance for Capacitor apps; passkeys are available through the same identity providers.
Secure Storage (encrypted SQLite). @capacitor-community/sqlite with
encryption enabled covers the common case; for regulated data, combine it
with key storage in the platform keystore.
Portals (native apps embedding web micro-frontends). The most specialised of the products. Teams embedding Ionic web apps inside existing native apps can use Capacitor directly inside a native project — Capacitor ships as a library you can host in a view controller or activity — with some glue code for the messaging Portals provided. Budget more here; this is bespoke.
Should enterprises worry about the framework?
The evidence says no. Since the announcement the team has shipped Ionic 8.x through 8.8 (March 2026), Capacitor 8, and Ionic 9 (August 19, 2026) with React Router 6, Vue Router 5, Angular 18–22, zoneless Angular, and a new migration tool. That cadence is what a maintained framework looks like, and OutSystems' own product depends on it.
What has changed is where the money goes. Ionic used to sell the infrastructure around the framework; now that infrastructure comes from the wider ecosystem — Capawesome, Capgo, the CI vendors, your identity provider. For enterprises this is mostly positive: fewer single-vendor dependencies, more standard tooling, and lower licence costs. The cost is a one-time migration, and a year of it being harder to find people who have done it.
A practical checklist
- List every Ionic commercial product in use and who owns the licence conversation with Ionic
- Schedule the Appflow migration now; it has the only hard date
- For Identity Vault / Auth Connect / Secure Storage, decide whether to take Ionic's continued-use option or migrate, and set a date either way — "continued use" without support is a slowly growing risk, not a plan
- Put Ionic and Capacitor major upgrades on a yearly calendar so the framework side never becomes a project
HybridMob has been an Ionic partner through the whole arc — Ionic 1 to Ionic 9, Cordova to Capacitor, Ionic Deploy to Appflow to Capgo — and remains listed in the Ionic Trusted Partners directory. If you need help reading your own exposure, contact us.