Blog RSS Feed

Cordova iOS 8.0.0 is now available!
By: Darryl Pogue
23 Nov 2025

After nearly 2 years of work, we are excited to finally announce that we have released Cordova iOS 8.0.0! This is Cordova's platform supporting the development of applications for iOS & iPadOS; now with better support for the latest platform features.

To upgrade:

cordova platform remove ios
cordova platform add ios@8.0.0

This is a major version release which includes some breaking changes!
We have tried hard to make the update process as smooth as possible for both application and plugin developers, while improving the experience for developers embedding Cordova iOS as a library.

For plugin authors, we've written a guide about Upgrading Plugins to Cordova iOS 8.x.

Release Highlights

  • Supported version minimums
    • The minimum supported iOS version is now 13.
    • The minimum supported Xcode version is now 15.
    • The minimum supported NodeJS version is now 20.17.
  • Embracing Swift
    • The platform project now uses Swift classes and a storyboard file.
    • Plugins can now be set up as Swift packages, including other Swift packages as dependencies.
    • CordovaLib is available as a Swift package to be embedded in existing projects.
  • Platform project modernizing
    • The Xcode project, and build target are now always named App.
      This resolves numerous issues around CocoaPods, multi-target projects, and Info.plist additions, but potentially breaks some hooks that assume the project name matches what's defined in config.xml.
    • The platform project now supports building for macOS using Catalyst.
    • The platform project has adopted the iOS Scene APIs, which are required for iOS 26 support.
    • CordovaLib (used as a library) supports targeting the visionOS platform.
  • Build-in status bar handling
    • Status bar handling is now built-in to Cordova iOS, and the StatusBar plugin is no longer required in most cases.
    • Whether the status bar is shown or not is controlled by the viewport meta tag's viewport-fit directive.
    • The background color of the status bar is controlled by the theme-color meta tag.
  • App icon simplification
    • Projects can now provide a single 1024px × 1024px icon in config.xml.
    • Projects building with Xcode 16 or newer can provide monochrome and dark mode icon variants.
    • See GH-1465 for details.
    • NOTE: Cordova iOS 8.0.0 does not include support for the new Xcode 26 Icon Composer file format. We hope to introduce support in the near future.
  • Bunches of bugs fixed
    • Range requests are now supported for large media files when using a custom protocol.
    • Opening system alert boxes from JavaScript code should no longer freeze the application.
    • Improved error messaging when no iOS simulators are installed.
    • Configurable behavior for recovering from web view crashes that sometimes left blank screens.
    • Fix for handleOpenURL() not firing reliably when the app is launched.
    • Improve handling for the deployment-target preference with CocoaPods.
  • Embedded framework improvements
    • Several memory leaks have been fixed when disposing of a Cordova view controller.
    • Several API improvements for specifying background colours and splash screen behaviour.
    • Introduced CDVSceneDelegate for integrating with the iOS Scene API.
    • Added nullability annotations to several classes and API methods.
    • New API documentation is published for the CordovaLib classes.

The full changelog is available to read here. Please report any issues you find on our Cordova-iOS GitHub issue tracker!