Appcelerator was a mobile app development platform acquired by Axway in 2016. It has been discontinued.
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Felgo
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Felgo provides components, tools and professional services for developing apps on Mobile, Desktop and Embedded platforms. The Felgo framework extends Qt with 200+ APIs. Among them is support for 3rd party SDK integrations like push notification or analytics, native iOS styling, Qt Quick Controls extensions for native look & feel on Android & iOS, density independence and responsive layout support. Felgo also provides features like AR (Augmented Reality) and Machine Learning integrations…
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
Felgo shines in rapid prototype development and fast iterations. It also has a very short learning curve compared to many other technologies that promise "code once, deploy everywhere." It is not appropriate if you are not willing to mess with the licensing related to Qt but I am still waiting for a clear answer on my doubts from the Felgo team.
Ready available solutions for all platform mobile app development.
Live hot reloading of UI and other advance controls by Felgo implemented in Qt.
Using Qt underneath provides an opportunity to developers to use it in all kind of sectors like embedded devices, mobile apps, desktop apps, games etc.
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.
I am happy with the constant feedback that I am receiving from the team. Although most of it is marketing related, there are some interesting and valuable materials that they have been pushing to ease my learning.
The quality of the documentation and the ease of use may be some important values to take into account.
We believe that the agility that we have acquired until now for developing apps for our business cases give this framework an important lead.
As with any product, Felgo has some edges to it, but from our past experiences evaluating "code once, deploy everywhere" platforms, we were really surprised at how fast the team went from exploring, into playing and presenting prototypes in very little time.
The dev cycle is really fast as I can get an almost instantaneous feedback on the changes that I make. And it is refreshing to see how I am able to target several platforms at once.
The javascript plus QML combination made it really easy to pick up for me and I am certain sure that many devs can migrate from Web only into multi-platform in a fast manner.
And there is also the possibility to implement C++ code if the need arises to support and bridge native libraries.
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.
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.
