OtaKitDeploy a hotfix to your Capacitor app in minutes
A critical bug is live and the next store review is days away. How to ship an emergency hotfix to your Capacitor app over the air with a force-immediate OTA release — no store queue.
A critical bug is live. A payment button is broken, an API change took down a screen, a typo is costing conversions. The store review queue is measured in hours to days — far too slow. This is the scenario over-the-air updates exist for. Here's how to ship an emergency hotfix to a Capacitor app in minutes with OtaKit.
If the fix lives in your web layer — JavaScript, CSS, HTML, most business logic — you can ship it over the air right now. Only changes to native code, plugins, or permissions require a new store binary.
The fast path
- Fix the bug and build your web app as usual.
- Release it, forcing an immediate apply so devices don't wait for a later cold start:
otakit upload --release production --force-immediate
- Watch it land. Devices pick up the bundle and apply it on their next check.
The --force-immediate flag is the difference between “fixed on next launch” and “fixed now.” See forced and mandatory updates for how immediate applies work.
Validate before you blast, even in a hurry
A hotfix that introduces a second bug is worse than the first. If you have even a few minutes, release to a staging channel and confirm the fix on a real device first, then promote the exact same bundle:
otakit upload --release staging # confirm the fix on device, then: otakit upload --release production --force-immediate
Have a rollback ready
The reason you can move this fast safely is that a bad bundle isn't fatal. If the hotfix misbehaves, automatic rollback returns devices to the last known-good bundle when notifyAppReady() isn't reached, and you can roll the channel forward to a corrected build. See rollback strategies.
Keep a hotfix runbook: the one-line release command, who can run it, and where to watch the rollback rate afterward. In an incident you want muscle memory, not documentation archaeology.
Where to go next
Read monitoring so you see the fix land, and update strategies for the immediate-apply configuration.