A question I still get from teams shipping internal Android apps: if the APK never goes through Play, can the WebView still receive a new zip?

Yes. The store installed the first binary. After that, the update server is just HTTPS. The plugin does not ask Google whether this device is allowed to change index.html .

I ship this for a living with @capgo/capacitor-updater . The same rule holds if you host the zip yourself. What matters is that the native plugin is already inside the APK, and that the APK is a real release (or a build you have explicitly allowed). Debug emulators are a different gate.

What the store is for

The store (or MDM, or adb install ) puts a native binary on the device. That binary contains:

the Capacitor WebView

your plugins, including the updater

a first copy of the web assets ( builtin )

Apple and Google allow you to refresh HTML, CSS, and JS that the WebView already loads. They do not allow you to swap native code that way. So a sideloaded APK can take a new JS bundle.…