After more than fifteen years of existence, the R package ape has continuously grown its contents, and has been used by a growing community of users. The release of version 5.0 has marked a leap towards a modern software for evolutionary analyses. Efforts have been put to improve efficiency, flexibility, support for big data (Rs long vectors), ease of use and quality check before a new release. These changes will hopefully make ape a useful software for the study of biodiversity and evolution in a context of increasing data quantity.