About Apache Cordova™

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

When using the Cordova APIs, an app can be built without any native code (Java, Objective-C, etc) from the app developer. Instead, web technologies are used, and they are hosted in the app itself locally (generally not on a remote http server).

And because these JavaScript APIs are consistent across multiple device platforms and built on web standards, the app should be portable to other device platforms with minimal to no changes.

Apps using Cordova are still packaged as apps using the platform SDKs, and can be made available for installation from each device's app store.

Cordova provides a set of uniform JavaScript libraries that can be invoked, with device-specific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries. Cordova is available for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.

If you want to use Cordova in your mobile application, take a look at our documentation. It includes Getting Started guides, the JavaScript APIs reference and examples, instructions on Upgrading from previous versions of Cordova, how to write your own Cordova plugin, and more. The selector in the top-right corner of the documentation will let you pick different Cordova versions and language translations. And there is a registry of third-party plugins that can be used in your mobile application.

Apache Cordova graduated in October 2012 as a top level project within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Through the ASF, future Cordova development will ensure open stewardship of the project. It will always remain free and open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Some additional information may be found on our Apache project page.

News Subscribe

• 09 Sep 2015 » Tools Release: September 9th, 2015

  New versions of cordova tools are now live!

  • cordova-lib@5.3.1
  • cordova@5.3.1
  • plugman@1.0.2
  • cordova-js@4.1.1

  To update your tools:

  • If you have cordova installed:

    npm install -g cordova

  • If you have plugman installed:

    npm install -g plugman

  Changes include:

  Read More
• 08 Sep 2015 » Cordova Plugins Registry becomes immutable

  Starting today, plugins.cordova.io has become immutable. Plugin authors are encouraged to move their plugins over to npm if they haven’t already. Plugin authors should checkout our guide to transition over to npm here.

  Users can start searching for cordova plugins which have moved over to npm on our new cordova npm search page.

  Cordova CLI version 5.0.0 or higher is required to fetch plugins from npm. If you want to use the latest releases of plugins, please update your version of Cordova. Alternatively, older cli users can add plugins via git urls. Example:

  cordova plugin add https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-camera.git

  Make sure to checkout our previous blog post about moving plugins to npm if you missed it the first time around.

  Read More
• 05 Sep 2015 » Apache Cordova BlackBerry 3.8.0

  We are happy to announce that Cordova BlackBerry 3.8.0 has been released and will be the default BlackBerry version after next cordova-cli release.

  This release adds support for adding blackberry10 platform on any workstation OS, adds subdomain whitelisting and includes several bug fixes.

  To upgrade:

  npm install -g cordova
  cd my_project
  cordova platform update blackberry10@3.8.0

  To add it explicitly:

  cordova platform add blackberry10@3.8.0 --save

  For non-CLI projects or for pre-3.0 projects, refer to the upgrade guides.

  Read More

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Want to Contribute?

Contributors are welcome! And we need your contributions to keep the project moving forward. You can report bugs, improve the documentation, or contribute code.

There is a specific contributor workflow we recommend. Start reading there. More information is available on our wiki.

The JIRA issue tracker and the dev mailing list are good places to identify areas to help out in.
Search the issue tracker: Search

To share your contributions with the community, you can send a pull request on GitHub to the Apache git mirrors. You can also advocate for your changes directly on our developer mailing list.

In order for your changes to be accepted, you need to sign and submit an Apache ICLA (Individual Contributor License Agreement). Then your name will appear on the list of CLAs signed by non-committers or Cordova committers.

And don't forget to test and document your code.

Each component of Apache Cordova is in a separate git repository:

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