Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review Improve performance while the app is in production. The init app development in planning, the testing stage is not an ideal scenario to use KDC yet.
Read full review Pros Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework. Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps. Read full review Cross-platform mobile development - we used this for developing the app on a native platform (which could be iOS, Android). Kony offers tools that are useful because they decrease costs and increase the speed at which apps are developed. In addition, cross-platform mobile development tools are generally quite simple to use as they are based off of the common languages for scripting, including CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It has become easy to find resources with the skill set especially because this is based out of common languages. In Kony mobility platform Visualizer makes app development quick and easy. Tons of documentation online. Used Kony to develop an amazing app that serves our customers well. WYSIWYG interface is great for building interfaces quickly. Build and test quickly for many different targets. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Manuals or instructions need to be streamlined with its high pricing. It's a very intricate platform. It only performs moderately while the app is currently in operation. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We evaluated variety of platforms like
Xamarin ,
Sencha , PhoneGap. When we were initially evaluating
Xamarin , it was not Microsoft and so the releases and features were not very streamlined. Also licensing was a issue with that.
Sencha was a very attractive cross mobile platform but was expensive. Just for handful of developers price was high. Ours is big enterprise so licensing costs became huge. PhoneGap is based out of open source Apache Cordova project and is completely free to use, which goes some way to explain its popularity. The enterprise version boasts marketing features via Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, so when it launches it will probably be monetized. Comparing with the features platform has to offer and the price tag attached to it, we narrowed down to using Kony.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Positive on ROI. I'm constantly utilizing Kony since it's a robust tool capable of publishing. It also shares prototype creations of apps in a highly intuitive and customizable environment. It provides a preview of apps in real-time. Collaboration is seamless. Important functionality includes smartphone features (without any written code involved) and accessibility to a browser, maps, and SMS. Trying to understand the user manual can be challenging since there are way too many features available. All of them aren't really necessary for beginners. And they've yet to offer them in a "phased" approach. Read full review ScreenShots