Big opportunity for Meteor in mobile apps

mobile
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The market for mobile apps keeps growing:

Revenue from in-app purchases and paid apps and games reached $150 billion in 2024 across iOS and Google Play – a staggering 13% YoY increase. Non-gaming drove most of this growth (+23% YoY)

(source: SensorTower 2025 State of Mobile report)

I think Meteor is missing out on this lucrative market because the current Cordova-based stack is outdated. I doubt many mobile devs will consider Meteor right now.

The major problem is that the tooling providers have either deprecated support for Cordova, or don’t support it at all. RevenueCat is such an example. They are a popular provider of analytics, dynamically configurable paywalls, etc. The RevenueCat Cordova SDK is deprecated, and it doesn’t support dynamic paywalls.

As an app developer, you really need tools like dynamically configurable paywalls to be competitive. Right now, there is no such tool for Cordova.

I have less experience with the plugin ecosystem for Cordova, but my impression is that it is also quite stagnant.

Capacitor seems to have a lot of support, but there may be better options. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at alternatives.

I like the idea of Progressive Web Apps (PWA), but they are not a solution right now. I would be starving to death without the customers I get via app stores. I don’t like paying the platform tax and all the rules, but that’s where the money is. It’s as simple as that.

I love Meteor, but when other app developers ask me about my stack, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Meteor because I know Cordova support is a big issue.

If Meteor’s mobile offering was updated, I think it could attract many more app developers. I know quite a few web devs and many of them are now building apps. Meteor is perfect for devs with a web background.

So I really hope the Meteor team will prioritize updating Meteor’s mobile stack soon. I think it would go a long way toward attracting more devs to the platform, and ultimately more customers for Galaxy.

Thank you!

@fredmaiaarantes

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I’m afraid that Meteor doesn’t have enough resource for that.
Meteor is still a good choice for Mobile app back-end. For example, you can use Meteor as back-end for React-Native app. Your app can work with Meteor by using Apollo Client and/or @meteorrn/core package.

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Do you really think it would take a lot of resources? I suspect it would just require a wrapping of Capacitor or Expo and some minimal but sustained effort to maintain the wrapping.

The main point I was trying to make is that the market for mobile apps is growing at quite a high rate. Higher than SAAS apps, for example, I think.

If you’re a young dev and you want to build an app that makes money, your best bet is to publish it in the App Store.

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The meteor.com front page also showcases a chat app. A strong, additional selling point would be something like “Easily publish to app stores”

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Modernizing the native stack on Meteor is on the roadmap. The ability of Meteor to deploy web apps across multiple platforms has always been one of its key benefits, along with its reactivity API. We still want to honor Meteor’s origins by thoroughly overhauling that part. Specifically, we plan to integrate the most relevant successor, CapacitorJS, or a similar tool. We have already discussed this in other forum posts, so we are fully aware of it and intend to pursue these improvements in the near future, likely after revitalizing the Meteor bundler with Rspack integration.

Regarding the tool itself, I have experience with the integration of both CapacitorJS and Meteor and I’m aware of all the benefits this transition would bring, especially the ability to use more modern packages and native APIs. I have a working approach to make them run together, and I’ve even been able to deploy through app store tracks.

CapacitorJS, as a tool for using the same web codebadse and JavaScript to deploy to native stores, is the most advanced option and a true successor to CordovaJS, with compatibility for Cordova plugins. This means migrating Meteor apps to CapacitorJS should be smoother than with other tools. I’m excited to be on the track, and we’re fulling commited for these modernizations to come.

Any other ideas for tools and their integration, feel free to open a discussion and start an experimentation phase so we can assess their viability and benefits through your contributions.

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I think you still can do it without this condition.