NativePHP has always been about giving Laravel developers the power to build native mobile applications without leaving the ecosystem they love. Soon, we will be taking that mission further with our plugin system.
#Why Plugins Matter
Mobile platforms are vast, thousands of native APIs, SDKs, and capabilities that developers might want to access. Building and maintaining support for every possible feature ourselves isn't sustainable, and it would slow our ability to focus on making the core experience exceptional.
Plugins change everything. Instead of waiting for us to add support for your favorite SDK or native feature, you can build it yourself, or grab one the community has already created. MediaPipe for ML-powered gesture recognition? Plugin. Bluetooth protocol? Plugin. ARKit for augmented reality? Plugin.
#Community-Driven Innovation
Plugins put the roadmap in your hands. If your project needs a capability that doesn't exist yet, you don't have to wait. Build it, share it, and help others facing the same challenge. This distributed approach means NativePHP can grow faster and in more directions than any single team could achieve alone.
With the community handling specialized integrations, our team can focus on making NativePHP's foundation rock solid, with a focus on performance optimization, Bifrost, and new ideas that benefit every app regardless of which plugins they use.
#A Leaner, Faster Core
Going forward, new feature development is being channeled into the plugin system itself. In a future version, we'll extract some of our current built-in APIs into dedicated, isolated plugins.
A leaner core means smaller apps, even faster builds, and quicker startup. You only ship code your app actually uses. For App Store submissions, this is a significant win, especially as Apple and Google do scrutinize unused capabilities. Your app includes only what you need, nothing more.
#First-Party Plugins
Don't worry, we're not leaving you to figure this out alone. We'll be releasing many of the fundamental plugins ourselves, fully supported and maintained by the NativePHP team. Camera, biometrics, geolocation, push notifications, these will all be first-party plugins you can rely on with confidence.
#The NativePHP Marketplace
Finding plugins will be dead easy too! As they'll all be Composer packages, they'll be in the same place you already go to for Laravel packages.
But on top of that, we're building a marketplace where plugin developers can distribute their work. And if you choose, you can even sell your plugins. Built something that saves developers hours of work? Price it accordingly. The marketplace gives you a way to earn from your expertise while helping fellow Laravel developers ship better apps.
#Looking Ahead
We're targeting Q1 2026 (January/February) for the initial plugin system release, along with the marketplace and a handful of first-party plugins to get you started. Our goal is to make building plugins as straightforward as building Laravel packages. If you know Kotlin or Swift alongside PHP, you'll be able to extend NativePHP in ways we haven't even imagined.
This is how NativePHP becomes more than a tool, it becomes a platform. The future is being written by all of us. We can't wait to see what you build.
🔥 Shane