Appcelerator - Not there yet
November 18, 2016
Appcelerator - Not there yet
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Appcelerator
Appcelerator was used to develop one of the enterprise mobile apps for our client (Comcast). It is being used by our department in Comcast. The purpose of using it was to have a framework that would make it easy to develop cross-platform mobile apps.
- Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework.
- Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps.
- 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.
- 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.
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.