Abstract vs. Appcelerator (discontinued)

• Large teams with dedicated design operations support
• UX managers that want a facilitated workflow for their teams
• Disciplined teams of individual contributors that want to adopt a process in their UI workflow
• Cross-discipline teams that want a central collaboration space for reviewing and critiquing UI artifacts
• If your files are named "FOR-REALS_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL_Super-Important-Project (copy).sketch"
• If you're managing multiple pattern libraries

Incentivized

I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However, Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles

Incentivized

• Versioning for desginers
• Collaboration between team members

Incentivized

• Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework.
• Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps.

Incentivized

• Asset exports are not as great as Zeplin and others.
• Filtering within files.

Incentivized

• It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug.
• There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things.
• If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed.
• It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same.
• The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow.
• Documentation needs to be improved.

Incentivized

Abstract has a difficult learning curve. If a feature-branch workflow is new to you, then it will take some getting used to. They make a lot of updates to the interface and these feature releases get ahead of their documentation. They rely heavily on an excellent customer support team and are present on various Slack channels to help design professionals with issues.

Incentivized

Abstract by nature is complex and has to respond to whatever changes in Sketch. So there are frequent issues. Support can be slow to respond and are not always helpful, but they are quick to find and patch the bugs. Overall, it's not the best support, but it hasn't been detrimental.

Incentivized

I purchased and administer Abstract. It was requested by our design department who evaluated it.

Incentivized

Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs. Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.

Incentivized

• Single source of truth for the team.
• Could quickly get expensive with corporate accounts.

Incentivized

• We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does.

Incentivized