Appcelerator (discontinued) vs. Swiftify

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

It is recommended to use Swiftify in any situation that requires iOS development because even if you develop just in Swift or just in Objective-C, it could be helpful for researching and investigating purposes. Additionally, if you need to convert big quantities of code from Objective-C to Swift, this tool will optimise that work. It will not translate a whole class of 2000 lines perfectly, but after converting it you can review the code and modify the lines that have not been properly converted, making you save more than the 50% of the time in that case. I've not been able to test it properly as I only used the trial version and it is really limited.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Helps to prevent redoing the whole code.
• Sometimes it is hard to find the exact command of Obj-C in swift.
• It helped me to learn more :)

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

• Sometimes the conversion doesn't make much sense. The Swift conversion doesn't compile, or is not optimized.

Incentivized

I don't have any problems with the platform. I like that their email responses are fast.

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

There's not much to compare - we haven't found any proprietary like it. Existing OpenSource solutions are unmaintained and Swiftify supports the latest versions of Swift.

• 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

• For now the impact has been small, considering that I used the trial version, it was helpful for small conversions. Summarising: Saving time on researching process

Incentivized