Native apps. Mobile APIs. Real-time analytics.

4.3
4 reviews
Made for

Users or agencies with experience in JavaScript development that are working to quickly and effectively provide native-like functions to the end client.

Not for

Users looking to provide a true native app.

 
Free trial
 
$39 - $259/user/month
Pricing details
Example customers

eBay

Cisco

T-Mobile

Features

App Platforms

  • Android
  • iOS
  • Windows
  • HTML5
  • Blackberry

Development Tools

  • JavaScript
  • Titanium

Location Services

GPS Location Tracking

 

Integrations

Pricing

Basic info

 
Free trial
 
$39 - $259/user/month
 
Monthly subscription
Annual subscription
  • Indie -$39/month
  • Team - $259/user/month
  • Enterprise - Contact vendor
Vendor Pricing

Reviews

4.3
4 reviews
Sort by
 
Client Interview
Dec 10 2015

Appcelerator a Strong Tool for Nearly Native Development

4.5

Features: 
4.5
Ease of use: 
5.0
Support: 
4.5
Willing to refer: 
5.0
See More
the reviewer
 
Information Technology and Services
 
11-50 Employees
 
Washington, DC
Development Team Lead, App Development Agency
1
 
Verified
The Review
Recommendations

This development team highly recommends the Appcelerator suite as a cross-platform development tool. The users highlight that it provides end clients with a nearly complete native experience. This team encourages other agencies to consider Appcelerator as a tool for their development arsenal, although doesn't recommend it as a tool for projects with particularly small budgets.

BACKGROUND

Can you please provide a brief description of your company and the role that you play there?

DIGITAL STRATEGIST: Our company is a mobile and web development firm based in DC with offices in New York City as well. My position is in digital strategy and that entails an array of digital marketing and marketing responsibilities.

DEVELOPER: I am a full-time developer at the company. I work on the front end of development as well as the backend. This allows me to communicate closely with the client to develop a solution for their problem.

SOLUTION

How does your company implement this platform or software?

DEVELOPER: We use Appcelerator extensively throughout the entire development process of our web apps and many of our mobile apps. It works well as a frontend development tool as well as a backend management tool. Regarding the backend, we’re able to lean on Appcelerator as an actual host for the web services that we produce and also the web applications if need be. We can also rely on Appcelerator as a database management tool. They offer a tool called ArrowDB, which we can utilize to house all the data that we use and consume through the mobile app. On the front end we rely on a tool called Appcelerator Studio. We install that on our work stations and communicate with the backend tools that they provide for us through the entire Appcelerator suite.

Was your company considering other platforms? Why this platform?

DIGITAL STRATEGIST: Appcelerator is just an excellent cross-platform tool in terms of giving the user that native experience. It mimics the native app experience very well. For certain projects, it allows us to give the client the native experience they are looking for without a higher cost of building individual native apps.

On an annual or monthly basis, how much does your company spend to utilize the platform?

We have four to five users in-house. There’s no cost for us because the client we develop for absorbs the cost.

FEATURES

Were there any software features/tools that you were really impressed by?

DEVELOPER: I would say when I first worked with the tool, the one thing that I liked the most was Alloy. Alloy is the MVC [Model View Controller] framework that Appcelerator implemented into their Titanium studio development environment. That means you’re able to rely on JavaScript, XML, and a styling sheet format called TSS [Titanium Style Sheets] to develop your application.

Before then, everything was strictly dealt with JavaScript and it was up to you to determine how you wanted to organize your application. This meant that I could organize it my way then if I shared my application with another developer and had them take over for me, they would have to use the structure that I put together. The Alloy framework forces you to organize the application in a certain way. Files have to go in particular directories and those files have to be structured in a certain way to communicate with the database. It helps with organization, but the other thing I liked about it is that at the time when I came on with this company I relied on web development. I was brand new to mobile development and was new to native development; I hadn’t yet picked up Objective-C or JavaScript. I have some Java in my background but I didn’t apply it to the Android platform. Appcelerator really helped me to get my feet wet with mobile development by using the hybrid development route as opposed to going straight to native development.

Looking back, are there any areas of the software that you feel could be added or improved upon?

DEVELOPER: For me, I would say that there are multiple tools out there that solve the cross-platform development problem. I feel the Appcelerator platform has solved that problem better than most. However, with these tools a lot of it comes down to the preference of the agency’s development team. So far, Appcelerator has suited our needs.

DIGITAL STRATEGIST: When clients have an expectation for a large array of different functionalities of their particular app, we recommend a native app in those cases. Appcelerator is a cross-platform framework so it has limitations. But those limitations are very small compared to the other cross-platform frameworks on the market.

Have you had to interact with the platform’s support team or reference their support resources?

DEVELOPER: Appcelerator has an online forum. I would consider the majority of that open source, but some of Appcelerator’s developers chime in occasionally. In terms of communicating directly with the Appcelerator team, I’ve done that on multiple occasions. They’ve helped us out with several problems that we have come across. There have been times when we think we found a new issue but they’re already aware of it and working on it. The Appcelerator team is very responsive.

What type of client do you recommend to use Appcelerator?

DEVELOPER: We’ve had several different clients come to us with many different problems and we’ve been able to apply Appcelerator to help solve most of those problems. It’s hard to pinpoint which exact types of projects Appcelerator works best for.

DIGITAL STRATEGIST: We wouldn’t ever recommend the use of Appcelerator for a very small project.

OVERVIEW

To sum up: We havea few quick questions, and for each question we ask you to rate the software on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the best.

What would you give the software for functionality of the features available?

Four and a half.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Five.

For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the resources available?

Four and a half.

Overall, satisfaction with the platform?

Four and a half.

How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?

Five. Appcelerator is definitely something you want in your arsenal of frameworks, it is a great solution to be able to offer clients but ultimately it depends on what the client’s needs are.

4.5
Overall Score
  • 4.5 Features
  • 5.0 Ease of Use
  • 4.5 Support
  • 5.0 Willing to Refer
 
Online Review
Nov 17 2015

Appcelerator a Feature-rich Cross-platform Software

4.0

Features: 
4.0
Ease of use: 
4.5
Support: 
4.0
Willing to refer: 
4.5
See More
the reviewer
 
Less than $250/yr. spend
 
Information Technology and Services
 
11-50 Employees
 
Washington DC Metro Area
Senior Cross-Platform Developer, SIMpalm
Neil Bothra
1
 
Verified
The Review
Recommendations

The user is senior cross-platform developer at SIMpalm, an application development agency headquartered in the Washington, D.C., metro area with development resources in India as well. SIMpalm favors native app development, but when a client needs an app developed quickly and affordably, their team uses Appcelerator. This user finds Appcelerator to be a robust and feature-rich cross-platform tool. This user highly recommends Appcelerator.

BACKGROUND

Could you provide a brief description of your company and the role that you play there?

SIMpalm is a mobile app and web development company. During the last six years, we have built more than 150 mobile apps. I am a senior cross-platform developer. I build cross platform apps using Appcelerator, Javascript, HTML5, and PhoneGap.

OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address by using Appcelerator?

We wanted to use Appcelerator to build cross-platform mobile applications.

SOLUTION

How does your company use Appcelerator?

Appcelerator allows us to build robust, feature-rich, user-friendly mobile applications very quickly.

Within your company, how many developers actively use Appcelerator?

We have three cross-platform mobile app developers, and they all use Appcelerator.

Was your company considering other solutions? Why Appcelerator?

We have used other cross-platform tools like Senecha Touch, Xamarin, and PhoneGap. However, we do not get the best user experience and functionality with those other tools. Appcelerator provides the best possible way to build an app.

Are you familiar with the payment plan your company subscribes to in order to use this solution?

We just have to pay $100 per year for an Apple developer account to upload the apps and a $25 one-time fee for an Android developer account.

Have you had to interact with Appcelerator's support team or reference their support resources?

We don't work with their support team, but we do reference the support documents on the Appcelerator site, and there is a growing community of users who are available to help. A paid support package is also available.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any success stories, metrics, statistics or other overall results from your company's use of Appcelerator?

We have built more than 10 iOS and Android apps using Appcelerator in the last five years. The apps we have created using Appcelerator look and perform like native iOS and Android apps. It has saved our clients money in development and maintenance since we use single source code to build both iOS and Android apps.

Does Appcelerator have any features or tools that really stand out?  

Several features do stand out. The Appcelerator Studio Designer allows us to create the UI [user interface] of the app rapidly, and we can manage the interaction and flow between the entire UI. We can see the entire UI flow in a single view. Appcelerator is JavaScript-based, so development is flexible and smooth, and its code is based on a MVC [model-view-controller] structure, so it's easy to add features and maintain the code.

Appcelerator Studio also integrates with platform simulators, which test the apps for various screen sizes and models of Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Because it is a cross-platform application, it saves time in the debugging process and saves the developer the headache of needing to learn two separate languages. Titanium houses all the capabilities needed for cross-platform coding while exhibiting a high level of native code reusability. Finally, Appcelerator Studio includes a comprehensive workflow for identifying, understanding, and fixing the most critical application crashes.

Are there any features or aspects of Appcelerator that could be improved?

Appcelerator does not provide support for libraries brought in by a third party, and large, intensive apps can be difficult to develop using just JavaScript. The software API [application programming interface] does require a considerable learning curve. Finally, no HTML5 or CSS usage results in less impressive animations.

How would you describe Appcelerator for other users considering this solution?

Appcelerator is a highly robust and open source development platform that allows developers to create powerful native applications – mobile as well as desktop – using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Currently, the Appcelerator Mobile SDK [software development kit] is the number one cross-platform mobile development solution available today and is being used by more than 250,000 mobile developers, who have successfully created more than 35,000 apps within Appcelerator Studio's framework.

Finally, we ask you to rate Appcelerator on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give Appcelerator for functionality?

Four.

What would you give it for ease of use?

Four and a half.

For support, as in responsiveness of their team or helpfulness of the available resources?

Four.

Overall, what is your level of satisfaction with Appcelerator?

Four.

How likely are you to recommend Appcelerator to a colleague or similar business?

Four and a half.

4.0
Overall Score
  • 4.0 Features
  • 4.5 Ease of Use
  • 4.0 Support
  • 4.5 Willing to Refer
 
Client Interview
Sep 02 2015

EDUCO Web Design Implementation of Appcelerator

3.5

Features: 
3.5
Ease of use: 
3.0
Support: 
3.0
Willing to refer: 
4.0
See More
the reviewer
 
Information Technology and Services
 
1-10 Employees
 
Chicago, IL
Creative Director, EDUCO Web Design
Chris Mickens
1
 
Verified
The Review
Recommendations

The client is EDUCO Web Design, a boutique web design agency in the Chicago area. This client needed a tool that would allow their team to develop an iOS mobile application quickly with the prospect of an Android application in the future. EDUCO Web Design utilized an earlier version of Titanium Appcelerator but, at the time, was comparing it against another cross-platform tool, PhoneGap. This client recommends the Appcelerator products for their effort to continuously improve the platform and provide updates. EDUCO Web Design looks forward to an improved Appcelerator support community.

BACKGROUND

Can you please provide a brief description of your company?

I work for EDUCO Web Design. We're a boutique web design agency in Chicago. We focus on user experience and on client education. 

What role do you play there?

I am the creative technical director, which means I oversee all of our projects in a development and design capacity. My experience is in advertising graphic design and web development programming. 

OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge your company was facing that incited the need for this platform?

I needed to build an app for a client and I needed to do it fast. I had no experience – it was an iOS app. At the time, it didn't need to be cross-platform compatible. We weren't looking to do an Android app at the time but it needed to be on the table for the future. At the end of the day, I didn't have experience using the typical native platforms.

SOLUTION

How does your company implement this platform or software?

I was looking for a way to be able to fulfill the client's needs and do it quickly from a learning perspective so I could fill that knowledge gap fast. They had what's called the Titanium Classic version, which is how I did the first app. Then they upgraded to Titanium Alloy, which is nice. It's got a model view controller setup, which is what a lot of people are more accustomed to working with. It was a cool improvement.

There was a bit of a learning curve – more than I had anticipated. But, not more so than I think would be appropriate for attempting to do something like develop a cross-platform compatible app. I don't want to call it buggy but, at the time, they were in an early version of Appcelerator and since then they've upgraded the Titanium Studio and completely changed the way the software works. It was a free software and I'm sure the developers were doing their best to keep track of all the bugs but, for me, there was a bit of an issue to figure out how the Titanium Appcelerator language translated into what I was trying to do. 

Was your company considering other platforms? Why this platform?

Titanium Appcelerator was one of the platforms I was looking at along with PhoneGap. At the time, they were the primary options for doing something that might be cross-platform compatible and utilized some of the development skills that I already had. I read one comparison review that had Appcelerator versus PhoneGap and Appcelerator sounded like a better option at the time, and that's why I went with it.

On an annual or monthly basis, how much does your company spend to utilize the platform?

A redeeming factor at the time was that it was free, so how could I complain. Now, they charge a subscription fee for Titanium Studio, which is their new updated version. I obviously can't fault them. They're doing a lot of development work to make sure everything is up to date. I'm sure it's a Herculean task to keep up with updates in iOS and Android development constantly.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any success, metrics, or overall results of your implementation of this platform?

Titanium was a lifesaver. What the cross-platform development tools try to do is super ambitious. To have a tool that is one size fits all for Android and iOS leaves a lot to be desired because it's a huge task. 

FEATURES

Were there any software features and tools that really impressed you?

It's obvious that they're developing and making changes constantly. It gets a little annoying when every time you crack open Appcelerator: "Do you want to update?" But, at the end of the day, that's a sign that the platform is being worked on constantly. It seems like they listen to the needs of the community and what people are asking for.

Looking back, are there any areas of the software that you feel could be added or improved upon?

There was a serious memory issue in the initial version when I first started using Titanium. If you made a moderately complicated app every time you tried to boot it up, a couple of things would start crashing. It didn't have a lot of ability to clear itself. You were getting stuck with a lot of garbage, and that was causing serious memory leakage issues. They really sorted that out in the last couple of versions, which was nice. 

Have you had to interact with the platform's support team or reference their support resources?

I can't say that I've ever reached out to their team. I'll speak more to the community. I found it lacking in the beginning. There still is a lot of decent documentation. The infrastructure is there. You can't blame Appcelerator for the lack of participation. They try to foster community. I typically worked on Drupal applications and I'm accustomed to a very robust community where you can go to Drupal and StackExchange and find comprehensive examples and case studies – people having experiences and sharing how they solved problems. That wasn't the case with Titanium Appcelerator. There wasn't a huge community around the software, so there wasn't a lot of resources for solving problems. A lot of times, you might come across an issue, "Google it", and you'll have one person who asks a question about it, but never had it answered. I think that was a bit of an issue for me. I was spoiled by the Drupal community and by the communities that you find on StackExchange. 

OVERVIEW

We have a few quick questions and, for each question, we ask you to rate the software on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give the software for functionality of the features available?

Three and a half.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Three.

For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the resources available?

Three. When I first started out the documentation wasn't quite as buffed up as it is now. It was a lot of trial and error instead of having concrete examples. 

For overall satisfaction with the platform?

Three and a half. It's a good software. At the time, it had quite a bit of bugs, but it was free. I made a couple of apps for free, so I can't complain much here.

How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?

Four. I would definitely recommend it. Especially given what my needs were and my knowledge base.

3.5
Overall Score
  • 3.5 Features
  • 3.0 Ease of Use
  • 3.0 Support
  • 4.0 Willing to Refer
 
Client Interview
Jul 02 2015

Enterprise App Solution Company's Implementation of Appcelerator

5.0

Features: 
5.0
Ease of use: 
5.0
Support: 
4.5
Willing to refer: 
5.0
See More
the reviewer
 
Confidential spend
 
Information Technology and Services
 
1-10 Employees
 
Richmond, VA
Chief Operations Officer, Shockoe
Alex Otañez
1
 
Verified
The Review
Recommendations

Shockoe is an enterprise application development firm located in Richmond, Virginia, and is an Appcelerator development partner. Shockoe has been utilizing Titanium and Appcelerator for nearly seven years to develop cross-platform applications for firms of all sizes, but some of their larger clients have included Capital One and CitiBank. This firm has worked with other tools including PhoneGap and Xamarin, but finds Appcelerator to fit their needs best. Shockoe highly recommends Appcelerator to other development firms due to its ease of developing native applications for users with a strong knowledge of JavaScript.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are Shockoe, an enterprise mobile application development firm. We focus on workforce parts of the applications, meaning business-to-business, business-to-employee, business-to-partner. We have built several customer-facing applications, even though our primary focus is the enterprise.

 

What is your position and responsibilities?

My role here is Chief Operation Officer, as well as Vice-President of Enterprise Mobility. I manage the operations, I also manage the details in the marketing department for the business.

 

OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Appcelerator?

We've partnered with Appcelerator for seven years now. We started working on Titanium. We've been a main advocate for the technology since its inception, so there wasn't really a need that incited our use. We saw the technology and thought that this was going to be the way of the future. Back in 2008 the founder thought that five to seven years from that point, people were going to have a strong focus on building cross-platform applications. He thought that the way Appcelerator’s Titanium was approaching it was excellent.

In 2010-2011 we actually saw an increased need for enterprise level applications. Due to Appcelerator’s analytics, performance management, and just a higher attention to detail, we thought that this platform was excellent, because of all the different services that they provided outside of the actual cross-platform solution.

 

Can you talk about how you have used Appcelerator?

Somewhere between 80-90% of our company’s implementations are actually done using the Appcelerator platform. We train businesses on Appcelerator and my team and I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, we teach mobile development using Titanium, and a large percent of our applications are built using the platform itself.

A couple of companies that I could reference are; Capital One and Citibank.

All these companies, the reason they chose to use Titanium and Appcelerator is because of the cross-platform nature. The majority of their employees and/or customers were split close to 50/50 on both Android and iOS. A very small percentage are using Windows, which Appcelerator now focuses on as well. Their goal was to be able to roll out applications in the near future on both platforms, with the expectation that, as soon as the Windows version of the cross-platform solution was released, that they would be able to do so as well. More and more we're getting asked to build not only Android and iOS, but also start planning for Windows.

 

Have you used other platforms? Why are the majority of your implementations with Appcelerator? What sets it apart, and why did you choose it?

The reason we chose Appcelerator was because we could truly build native applications. We have direct access to the native code. Furthermore, it's a compiler, it compiles native Android, native iOS, and now, native Windows applications. So rather than using the term cross-platform, we could build native applications - that's the first thing.

 

The second thing - the platform itself, if we take out the Titanium solution, it also supports truly native built applications. If you build and application using iOS or using Android, you could actually still use the platform to track performance, to track analytics, or to do cross-testing. The platform doesn't only work with Titanium, it basically embeds the code to track current iOS or Android applications. That's one of the main uses.

The third reason is, compared to other platforms, it's a lot more intuitive. JavaScript developers are easier to find. JavaScript is an easy language to build and maintain, and it's very scalable. We've used other platforms, we've tried building on PhoneGap, even though PhoneGap offers lousy experience and it’s a hybrid solution, it's not really the experience that our users are looking for.

We've tried using Xamarin early on - when I say early on I mean about two years ago - and the issue with them was that, as a developer, you had to be experienced in Java, Objective-C, and C # in order to build in Xamarin. It was very tricky for a developer to be an expert in all three languages, whereas with Titanium and Appcelerator, our developers are experts in JavaScript, and still able to develop native applications with just a strong understanding of Objective-C, Java.

Whereas with Appcelerator, you're building everything on JavaScript and then compile it up to the native code. Appcelerator seemed a lot more intuitive from a UI perspective, because most of the brains of an application normally live in the web services or in the backend, and the UI is basically displaying that. Whereas Xamarin took a different approach, where it's using a lot of the logic and building it into the application, so you really had to be an expert in all different types of languages.

 

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We personally don't spend anything because we are now partners with Appcelerator, but the nice thing about Appcelerator is they start as low as $150 a month for an individual license, all the way up to $600,000. So the barrier for entry is very, very low.

 

What distinguishes Appcelerator from other platforms?

A couple things. The first one is definitely price. From a price standpoint, the value that Appcelerator brings is second to none. If you broke out all the individual features, that are compiled into the platform price, separately into individual components, there is no way you could even come close to affording one or putting that to value. That's one of the main reasons.

The second thing is speed to market. Being able to build on JavaScript and deploy in two native platforms, it's unbeatable, and I don't believe that there's any platform that competes with that.

The third thing is not necessarily a technology feature, but the people who work at Appcelerator are beyond incredible. Our relationship with them, and the way they treat their customers, is something unique in the marketplace. They truly want to make sure that their customers get what they're paying for, and there's this individual attention to each customer that they work with.

 

We have five additional questions. For each of these, we ask that you rate Appcelerator on a scale of one to five, with five being the best score.

 

What would you give Appcelerator for the functionality of the features that they do have available?

Five.

 

What would you give Appcelerator for ease of implementation into your business?

Five.

 

For support, as in responsiveness of the Appcelerator team?

Four and a half.

 

Your overall satisfaction with Appcelerator, out of five?

Five.

 

Out of five, how likely are you to recommend Appcelerator to a similar business?

Five. We are an implementation partner. We work with clients to develop Appcelerator solutions for them. I recommend other companies look into Appcelerator to use it for their mobile solutions.

5.0
Overall Score
  • 5.0 Features
  • 5.0 Ease of Use
  • 4.5 Support
  • 5.0 Willing to Refer