When Max Lynch, Ben Sperry, and the earliest team members first started Ionic back in 2012, they had a simple mission: to help web developers deliver great mobile experiences using the skills they already had. There wasn’t a grand plan to build a commercial business, just a shared passion for empowering developers with great tools, and a commitment to open source as the best way to reach the greatest number of developers.
As the years went by, reality set in. To keep the lights on and support the open-source mission, we, as Ionic, had to find ways to fund the business. That led to the creation of commercial offerings that complemented our open-source tools.
We started with Ionic Cloud, first envisioned as a mobile backend as a service (MBaaS). It eventually evolved into Ionic Appflow, focused on mobile DevOps—helping developers build, deploy, publish, and update their apps.
From there, we added support and advisory services for teams building mission-critical apps and introduced enterprise-grade solutions like Identity Vault, Auth Connect, and Secure Storage to tackle security and privacy challenges. Most recently, we launched Ionic Portals to help scale native app development through mobile micro frontends.
Fast forward to October 2022: Ionic joined the OutSystems family. Since then, we’ve focused on:
- Supporting and maintaining our open source products, especially Ionic Framework and Capacitor, which are central to OutSystems’ mobile stack.
- Bringing features from our commercial lineup into OutSystems Developer Cloud, like publish-to-app-store capabilities, Live Updates, and mobile micro frontends.
- Supporting and maintaining the Ionic commercial offerings.
What’s Changing
Today, we have discontinued new customer sales for all Ionic commercial products and services—including Ionic Appflow, Identity Vault, Portals, and all other paid components of the ecosystem. For current customers, we will begin a multi-year process of discontinuing maintenance and support services. During this process, we commit to remaining in close communication with our customers to ensure ample time for continuity planning. In certain cases, options for continued long-term use may be available.
If you’re using Ionic commercial products:
- Appflow users: You’ll continue to have access through December 31, 2027.
- Enterprise customers: Ionic understands the disruption that may be caused by discontinuing sales, maintenance, and support of its commercial offerings. In order to support our Enterprise customers through this transition, we will offer an option for continued use and self-service maintenance and support of our commercially licensed software, such as Identity Vault, Auth Connect, Secure Storage, Ionic Portals, and Enterprise AppFlow. We will be in touch directly with existing customers about eligibility, next steps, and continuity plans for each offering.
If you have questions, please reach out to us at
Reaffirming Our Commitment to Open Source
Most importantly, Ionic’s open source software, including Ionic Framework and Capacitor, will remain free and open source. These offerings will continue to be maintained and improved since they form a significant portion of the OutSystems mobile stack. We will share a more detailed view and roadmap of what you can expect in 2025 and beyond when it comes to our open source offerings. Please stay tuned for more details.
Looking Ahead
We’re incredibly grateful to our community for the love and support you’ve shown over the years. This is a new chapter for Ionic—one that allows us to double down on our original mission of empowering developers with the best open source tools for building amazing mobile experiences.
-The Ionic Team
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