Oslo, Norway, October 12, 2021 — Ionic and Neptune Software today announced a partnership to bring improved cross-platform development capabilities to Neptune Software’s leading enterprise low code platform. This new partnership will allow Neptune Software’s customers to build mobile, desktop, and web applications that are powered by Capacitor, a leading cross-platform mobile solution built and maintained by Ionic. Using Capacitor, Neptune Software’s customers will be able to build cross-platform mobile apps that run and perform seamlessly on any device (across iOS, Android, web, desktop, and more), gain full access to native SDKs, and add custom native functionality – all from a single application codebase.

“Delivering a world-class app development platform for enterprise mobility has been a key imperative for Neptune Software from day one.”, says Matthias Steiner, Chief Product Officer at Neptune Software. “The partnership with Ionic further strengthens our low-code platform’s capabilities and ensures that our customers have a rock-solid, high-performant and future-proof foundation for their mission-critical mobile development needs.”

Neptune Software is a leader in the growing low code development space and featured in the Gartner ® Magic QuadrantTM for Multiexperience Development Platforms (MXDP). Its leading enterprise app development platform – Neptune DXP – provides rich functionality to deliver mobile applications via hybrid web applications and progressive web apps (PWA).

“We strongly believe that boosting developer productivity and streamlining the development process is vital to empower IT departments to rapidly deliver impactful business solutions. In that context, the power to build apps that run on all devices – with just a single codebase – tremendously accelerates innovation cycles and reduces total costs of development.”, says Ole-André Haugen, Co-founder and CTO at Neptune Software.

While Neptune DXP will continue to support Cordova based applications, the company is adding support for Capacitor as a drop-in alternative for new applications built on the platform. This will give developers greater control and flexibility, improved integration with native libraries on mobile devices, and the benefit of a healthy and vibrant community with frequent contributions and a growing ecosystem.

“Adding Capacitor to Neptune DXP’s mobile stack is not just an exciting partnership for us, but above all a perfect match and natural progression of our platform strategy. Ionic’s valued experience with cross-platform mobile technology materialized not only in a leading next-gen platform, more importantly it is backed by a rapidly growing ecosystem and developer base. In my view, Capacitor is just the beginning of integrating Ionic’s portfolio and services into Neptune DXP,” Ole-André Haugen adds.

Capacitor provides a more modern approach than Cordova, taking full advantage of the latest web and native APIs. First introduced by the Ionic team in 2018 as an MIT licensed open source project, Capacitor was designed to be fully backwards compatible with Cordova and its expansive library of native plugins. As such, existing Cordova users can reuse their existing plugins in any Capacitor application.

“For years now, Cordova has been the standard technology powering the most popular low code platforms on the market today,” says Max Lynch, CEO and co-founder of Ionic.

Adoption of Capacitor has grown significantly over the last few years, from a few hundred downloads a month to now over 600,000 per month. Capacitor now powers a significant percentage of the apps in the app stores, including apps for well-known brands like Burger King, Tim Hortons, Sworkit, H&R Block, and more. The growth of Capacitor adoption—along with the new partnership with Neptune Software—is likely to signal a sea change for the large and growing low code market.

“We’re very excited to partner with Neptune Software and provide them with the tools to continue to deliver the best mobile experience to their users,” says Lynch. “Neptune is a leader in the space, and we expect other low code platforms will follow suit and standardize on Capacitor as the way forward.”