cordova-plugin-app-lifecycle

App lifecycle actions not covered by Cordova core. Currently: cleanly terminates the app process on iOS and Android.

Why

navigator.app.exitApp() (Cordova core) has no iOS implementation — Apple's guidelines discourage apps from quitting themselves, so cordova-plugin-whitelist/core never added it there. As a workaround, Herdwatch was calling firebaseX.sendCrash() to force the app to close after an IndexedDB corruption error (see FARM-9765). That deliberately triggers a real native crash purely to end the process, which pollutes Crashlytics crash-free-user metrics and can trigger false on-call alerts.

This plugin exposes a real forceClose() action instead:

• iOS: calls exit(0) after a short delay (letting the JS success callback round-trip first). This is a clean process exit, not a crash — Crashlytics does not report it as one.
• Android: calls Activity.finishAffinity() followed by Process.killProcess(Process.myPid()) so the whole task is torn down, not just backgrounded.

Installation

npm install @herdwatch/cordova-plugin-app-lifecycle

Usage

cordova.plugins.appLifecycle.forceClose();

The call does not resolve on success — the process exits before any callback can fire. It only rejects if the native side reports an error before exiting.