Upcoming Capacitor v4: Removing Session Replay & Profiling, shifting to focused maintenance

[lucas-zimerman]

Starting with the next major version of @sentry/capacitor, we are removing Session Replay and Profiling and shifting the SDK to a focused maintenance model centered on error and crash monitoring.

What's changing?

Going forward, @sentry/capacitor will focus on reliable error and crash reporting across iOS, Android, and Web. While we will continue to update the SDK regularly, we will no longer support Session Replay & Profiling. All other features will continue to be supported.

Why?

Capacitor's `WebView-based` architecture creates unique challenges for features like Session Replay that need to bridge the native and web layers. Rather than ship a subpar experience, we're focusing on making error monitoring rock-solid.

We're also investing heavily in sentry/react-native and sentry-dart (Flutter) as our primary cross-platform mobile SDKs — both support the full Sentry feature set including Session Replay, Profiling, and Performance Monitoring. The broader ecosystem is heading in this direction too: Ionic has discontinued its commercial products (Appflow, Identity Vault, Enterprise SDK) as of February 2025, and while Capacitor itself remains actively maintained as open source, the enterprise tooling around it is contracting.

If you need Session Replay or Profiling, we recommend migrating to one of our full-featured cross-platform SDKs: sentry/react-native or sentry-dart (Flutter).

[linear-code]

CAPA-84

[thmclellan]

That's too bad but understandable. For customers who want to have session replay and profiling for web users only, are there any suggested approaches to (1) load sentry-capacitor when running in native iOS/Android/Webview and (2) load a standard sentry-javascript package (e.g. @sentry/angular in our case) when running in a regular browser environment?

Maybe that's a DIY build-time workaround beyond the scope of this repo, but if you have any advice or examples on that front it would be helpful. Thanks

[lucas-zimerman]

Since Sentry Angular is the one doing the main task for both cases, you can still indirectly call the parameters on CapacitorOptions, although you will need to ignore the warnings for it:

Sentry.init(
  {
    dsn: '',
    integrations: [
       // Load Sentry Replay integration from Sentry Angular
       ,...
    ],
    // @ts-ignore
    replaysSessionSampleRate: 1.0,
    // @ts-ignore
    replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0,

But again, there are no guarantees Session Replay will continue working on the Web

[thmclellan]

Thanks @lucas-zimerman. You mentioned no guarantees Session Replay will continue working on the Web.... is that because we're calling it through SentryCapacitor or is it due to the possibility of Capacitor (being present somehow even in a straight up web experience) somehow conflicting with Sentry Angular's normal Session Replay logic?

[lucas-zimerman]

This is mainly a Capacitor issue, not Sentry. If Capacitor changes how it renders webviews, Angular Session Replay may stop working (as it did on mobile), and it won’t work with Sentry’s Capacitor or Angular integrations.

[thmclellan]

When an Angular-based capacitor app is published for the web (https://app.domain.com), it acts like a standard Angular SPA without a webview. Capacitor's bridge/webview handling is a no-op in that scenario, and Capacitor plugin calls typically just go through to their web implementations. If Sentry Capacitor's deprecation is mostly about warnings and we can still enable it in CapacitorOptions then we should be good to go. Thanks