Weekly Wrap-up: May 2, 2025

Introducing a new series: Weekly Wrap-ups! Every Friday, we’ll share a quick rundown of new features, quality of service enhancements, and bug fixes that the VoltBuilder Dev Team has worked on during the week. Our goal? To keep you in the loop on how we’re refining the platform, without burying you in technical jargon or marketing speak. If you’ve ever wondered, “What’s actually changing behind the scenes?”, these posts are for you.

Without further ado, here’s what we’ve been working on this week to make your app-building experience smoother:

JVM Fallback Flag for Capacitor

We recently added support for Capacitor 7, which requires JVM 21. Some of you ran into errors when trying to build projects with dependencies that are not yet ready for JVM 21. We’ve added a fallback flag to switch back to JVM 17 (our previous default) to allow building using older versions of Java.

That said, if you’re using Capacitor, we recommend updating to Capacitor 7, which targets the latest Android and iOS SDKs.

The new flag will help users experiencing errors like Execution failed for task ':[plugin]' > error: invalid source release: 21. Add the flag to your voltbuilder.json to use it:

{
  "capacitor": {
    "jvm_21": false
  }
}

Smarter JVM Version Detection

Along with the new flag, we’ve added smarter JVM version detection. No more manual guesswork! We’ve fine-tuned how VoltBuilder detects your Capacitor version and automatically selects the right JVM version.

Better Support for Legacy NPM Packages

Older NPM packages that rely on binary dependencies can be tricky. We’ve improved handling for these deprecated packages so they’re less likely to cause build failures.

Comment Support for JSON Files

We’ve added support for comments and other quality of life improvements for your JSON files. Here’s a short list of enhancements you can use to make configuring your builds easier:

Comments! Now you can add // single-line or /* multi-line */ comments.
Trailing commas in objects and arrays won’t break your config.
Single-quoted strings and multi-line strings (with escaped characters) are now valid.
Numbers can be hex, have leading/trailing decimals, or start with a +.
Extra whitespace is allowed for readability.

We’ll be updating our sample projects to showcase how you can utilize these changes soon.

Wrapping Up (pun intended…)

That’s it for this week! These updates are improvements and fixes that are based on your feedback (or what we notice ourselves as we use VoltBuilder). Got suggestions? Let us (and the community) know over on our forum. Until next Friday, happy building! 🚀

What VoltBuilder Does

VoltBuilder converts your web projects into native Android and iOS apps. VoltBuilder is a wrapper for Apache Cordova and Ionic Capacitor, so you can add native features to your apps via Cordova and Capacitor plugins.

VoltBuilder's Key features:

Produces native executables — for easy testing & app store publishing.
Publish in minutes — VoltBuilder uploads directly to Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Easily generate certificates — VoltSigner makes Android and iOS certificates. No Mac needed!
Nothing to install — just head to the Uploads page to get building.
Nothing to store — we don't keep your passwords, certs, or code in our cloud.
Always up-to-date — we install and maintain the latest SDKs and tooling so you don't have to.