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 Appsee was a great choice and addition before their struggle with Apple over user screen recording. Now that that's gone, its insights are rather basic and not worth the price point. This would be a perfect analytics platform for a company looking to increase its user experience, new on-boarding, or going through a redesign to see user activity and reactions, but not anymore.
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 User session recordings of individual users Touch heatmaps and unresponsive gestures 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 The user screen recording was quickly shut down on Apple devices after about a week of us using Appsee. Now it's just basic boxes which aren't nearly as helpful or insightful in bettering our user experience. If we would have known this would happen, or that Appsee didn't have that feature, we wouldn't have gone with them. No integration with Branch (the world's best and probably biggest attribution platform). 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 Appsee set itself apart from competitors with the user screen recording, but since that is no longer a good feature on iOS, it makes Appsee's competitive advantage obsolete. Its data analytics, funnels, and crash reporting are relatively basic or haven't lead to any breakthroughs. I would stay away from Appsee, save your money, and go for a platform like
Mixpanel if possible, which has analytics, attribution, and engagement for the same if not cheaper price.
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 Better conversion rates Less bugs/crashes Better user retention Read full review ScreenShots