Appcelerator was a mobile app development platform acquired by Axway in 2016. It has been discontinued.
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esper.io
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Esper enables device management for company-owned and managed iOS and Android tablets, kiosks, smart phones, and IoT edge devices. Esper’s device platform can be used to manage an entire multi-OS device fleet from a single pane of glass.
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
esper.io helps manage devices to control how they are used and what software is allowed to be run on the device. This help us ensure proper usage of the device and also prevent all kinds of misuse of the devices. esper.io completely replaces the device interface and locks the devices preventing theft, misuse and abuse.
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.
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.
esper.io allows for bulk configuration of deployed devices. esper.io is also easier to set up and start compared to other competitors. The software installs are smaller and quicker. Great support for different methods for onboarding devices.Support for various OS and Device configurations. Free for 100 devices; provide ample testing before committing to any purchase.
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.
