Capacitor plugin upgrade interruption and cross-platform binary consistency

Handling Interrupted Plugin Upgrades in Capacitor

Capacitor does not provide a built-in rollback signal or a standardized version-revert flag when a plugin upgrade is interrupted. Because the CLI validates the remote manifest before initiating native binary installation, a failure during the native step can leave the application in a "partial state" where the manifest is updated but the binaries are inconsistent across iOS and Android.

Indicators of Functional Plugin Binaries

There is no single CLI flag that confirms if a previous version remains active. Instead, you must rely on the following indicators to determine the state of your binaries:

• iOS: A failure often manifests as a crash during app launch or a build-time error regarding missing symbols in the embedded framework. If the app launches but plugin methods fail, the framework may be in an inconsistent state.
• Android: The application typically launches, but runtime failures occur when the app attempts to access resources or classes that were not fully synchronized during the interrupted installation.

Manifest Fetch vs. Native Installation Failures

The framework differentiates these two failure points based on the sequence of the capacitor update command:

• Manifest Fetch Failure: The CLI aborts before any native changes are made. No native binaries are touched, and the app remains on the previous version.
• Native Installation Failure: The remote manifest was successfully fetched and validated, but the process failed during the platform-specific installation. This creates the version mismatch, as the configuration now expects a newer version than what is physically present in the native project.

Reliable Diagnostic Approach

To determine the native plugin state without manually digging into Pods or Gradle files, use the verbose plugin list command to compare installed native versions against the expected manifest version:

npx cap plugin list --verbose

Compare the output for both iOS and Android. If the version codes differ between platforms, or if they differ from the version specified in your package.json or capacitor.config.json, the upgrade was interrupted.

Verification Steps

To confirm consistency, perform these checks:

1. Run npx cap plugin list --verbose and verify that version codes match across both platforms.
2. Cross-reference the native version codes with the remote manifest version.
3. If a mismatch is found, the safest resolution is to delete the platforms/ directory (or the specific plugin folders within the native project) and run npx cap sync to force a clean installation.

Note: To provide a more specific recovery path, please clarify if the interruption occurred during the npm install phase or during the npx cap sync/update phase.