Thoughts on the 12/10/18 Android Outage

Earlier this week, many Android/Google/Firebase libraries were unpublished from JCenter, causing any builds that depended on these libraries to fail across the board.

This impacted a number of community members and Ionic users. But, thanks to the quick efforts of our team, anyone using Ionic Appflow was safeguarded. We were able to find a workaround for the issue and automatically patch builds on the fly to restore service to our customers using Ionic Package, a cloud build service that is part of Ionic Appflow, until Google resolved the issue.

In the last few months, we’ve experimented with providing more of these patches for issues, like availability of dependencies and npm outages, and intend to do this more in the future to add even more value for our users.

For enterprise teams that want even greater protection and peace of mind, we recently introduced Ionic Enterprise Engine. Ionic Enterprise Engine (IEE) provides a stable, supported version of the entire Ionic ecosystem, including native plugins, platforms, and build tools. IEE not only ensures that we can quickly fix bugs to provide stability for large enterprises, but that we are also able to push these updates upstream to benefit the community and prevent outages like this from occurring in the future.

Of course, we understand that not every individual or company uses Appflow or IEE, and we care about all Ionic development teams, no matter the size. That’s why, during the outage, we released a knowledge base article to inform the community on how to solve the issue and hope we did a good job in spreading the message.

We hope that the above gives a little more insight into our dedication to stability for the entire ecosystem and we will continue to prioritize communicating these fixes so our users can spend more time and focus building software that benefits the business.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Appflow or IEE could help support your team or company, please reach out here.