16 Answers

• Honestly, the pricing is shocking to me too. I'm glad I didn't invest too much time in porting my app over. That's not to say that Titanium isn't a good product, but the pricing makes it out of reach for the bootstrapper.

• I am finding conflicting info about the community edition. Can somebody please confirm whether the community edition can run without ads or other data collection?

• There is no charge for community edition and no different between it and Pro Subscription in terms of functionality.

• Jeff, I have been looking at the docs and see that they are getting better.
  Is there a way that the community can contribute examples etc. to the documentation?
  Mark

• Hi All,

  I have no problem with paying for a certain level of support. Right now, I can't afford to spend $200/month for support. However, since 1.0 has been released, I've found 2 bugs that have been confirmed by other users. No one from Appcelerator has responded. Is someone going to look at these bugs if I don't pay the $200? I really don't feel right about paying for the privilege of doing QA for Appcelerator. I really think this framework is fantastic and I developed a new app in just a week. So I am a big supporter, but the support framework has to allow non-paying developers to get a response/help with problems they didn't cause. We're on your side.

  My $.02

• Hi guys, I don't know the details of Monotouch but it looks like you buy the tools to do the compiling, with Titanium that is provided free when you sign-up.

  Monotouch seems to have a community, but it looks like the licence doesn't offer a 'support package' - whereas official support is a principle component of 'Titanium Professional offering'. i.e. it's in addition to the base technology. So it probably depends on whether you need SLA-type support.

  cheers,
  Chris.

• The pricing model that Titanium is currently offering needs to be considered in terms of what the value is to you as a developer. If you are developing an app that you intend to earn revenue from then there is great value in paying the $199/month during your development phase and being assured that your problems can be resolved quickly.

  Since it's a monthly subscription it can be stopped (I presume) once development is over. Or after an initial period after release.

  As someone who is just "playing" at the moment and looking for that original iPhone app idea I certainly cannot justify or afford these costs but do see the value of them.

  I would say, however, that before even considering a subscription at whatever rate the quality of freely available documentation must be far better than it currently is (I hope this will change soon). I would not want to pay for support issues that should have been documented in the first place.

  Titanium is a great development platform and I applaud the developers for bringing it to us but it can easily let itself down with a reputation for inaccurate and incomplete documentation, particularly with other solutions also being available and people now trying to make a choice.

  Regards

  Mark

• Mark, have you looked at all the updated API documentation on the site? I'm confused. We're still in the process of bringing over some of the older documentation into this site today and tomorrow but the API docs are now pretty close to complete and accurate.

  Sure, we know we need to do more documentation and we've had doc issues in the past… But compared to others and most open source projects, c'mon.

• this post cleared up lot of my concerns. I am a believer now.

  link

• Hi All,

  I have no problem with paying for a certain level of support. Right now, I can't afford to spend $200/month for support. However, since 1.0 has been released, I've found 2 bugs that have been confirmed by other users. No one from Appcelerator has responded. Is someone going to look at these bugs if I don't pay the $200? I really don't feel right about paying for the privilege of doing QA for Appcelerator. I really think this framework is fantastic and I developed a new app in just a week. So I am a big supporter, but the support framework has to allow non-paying developers to get a response/help with problems they didn't cause. We're on your side.

  My $.02

• I agree the pricing is a bit steep. It is more than an ADC membership (which also provides pre-release versions of software, developer forums, etc).

  I went ahead and signed up for now, but I think that $50/mo would be much more reasonable. By reasonable I mean I would be more likely to keep my subscription active even if I didn't really NEED it that month (no projects needing support requests, no major new versions on the horizon, etc).

• 200/month is way beyond what a "small" developer can achieve! I really thougt about getting appcelerator pro … but no chance with this plan. If you really want more folks to get pro you have to lower prices.

• I downloaded and installed right now. Just after the iPad SDK 3.2 gm.

  I dont even tried out and I am afraid already.

  After install Titanium told that the framework needed upgrade for 1.1.2. I did it.

  After that the IDE told that my 1.1 IDE needed to be upgraded to 1.0 ! huh?
  What? What do I do? I am stuck and afraid to allow it… Seem to be a big BUG right on intall…

  This kind of bug, for me, should be corrected in less than 24h or the damages can be enormous to the developers base.

  The site says if develops for iPad, but when I watch the videos I could not find out ANY trace of iPad development…

  When I click "help" on the Titanium interface nothing shows up. Not even a PDF?

  On september another company will launch an IDE for iPhone/iPad for US$999,00 one time only and probably will decrease the price after as usual with other products. I liked what I saw until now.

  I did not checked Monotouch. I will, but I dont like the Mono fat framework dependent and unstable things (I tried mono in the past for cross development and gave up. Interface problems running different OS).

  I'll not continue my test of Titanium as I am afraid of bug crashs.

  For US$200/month it's one of most expensive tools I could find out. Using it for 1 year is U$2400,00. What happens when someone stops the signature? As I see this tool "phones home" constantly to check things. Will it downgrade the IDE for professional to community and insert back that ad splash screen that the community version has?

  I will uninstall and check again in the next release to see if its a little bit more mature.

  People here told that paid for bug resolution and did not get answers. I believe that support team is the same developer team and they are too busy correcting bugs and adjusting iPad problems, integrating a help or docs, and they will not answer until they finish something more useful like huh… Version 1.2?

  I'll wait a bit more. ; )

• Monotouch. I dont think it does Android. Appcelerator does iPhone and Android. Second issue I have with Monotouch is that its C#… if your doing iPHONE/iPAD stuff, why not just do it in Obj-C as oppose to C#??? ( its kind of the same learning curve).

• Guys, come on, you're letting yourselves down by making this prohibitively expensive. I've only just started with Appcelerator and signed up for the affordable Indie solution $49 because of course I'll need a debugger to get anything done. But I have immediately hit issues with using the Android emulator, and I've posted my issues to the Q&A area and am yet to get a response. So how I am supposed to go any further? I'd be happy to pay $199 a month for the months I need extra support (probably first few months), but to force me to sign up for 12 months is a joke, single developers can't afford $2,400 a year so you're forcing them to use other solutions such as Rhodes or Phonegap. Why not come up with a per incident price for support and then at least I know I can use the framework and if I really need support I know it's available. This needs to be solved as I am being forced to use better supported solutions.

• At first it is a pain to find what caused a bug, one time it took me an entire day on Android to find a simple bug. But then again thats Android with its slow emulater.

  Once you know what kinds of bugs you can expect its easy to find them the more often you programm. You know what you are looking for, what errors are caused by what programming error. This made me a hell of alot of a better programmer, since i dont depend on a debugger or fancy programm like visual studio for instance.

  I havent had any compromise from appcelerator on iPhone, everything i needed to make i was able to. The challenging part is creating creative workarounds to recreate some elements from other apps etc. Appcelerator does not make use of the iPhone api for 100% thats a downside. But by being creative is a loophole.

  For Android though, its a bit harder. The API delivers alot more bugs on Android the iPhone, and with the slow emulator i had months ago ( should be fixed with fast dev now ) it was a pain.

  Looking at what youve been looking into, Appcelerator really is the best choice.

  My suggestion, go develop for Android first. Yes it will be hard at first, but the result of this pain is rewarding. Also a reason for this is that a titanium app build for Android and porting it to iPhone is easier then porting it from iPhone to Android.

  Since i did not had the resources at the time to develop for Android and iPhone at the same time, i would have done that.

  If you can, create your app and develop that 1 app for both platforms. With new code test for both platforms. This does take somewhat longer at first but your code will be alot better for a multi platform app.

  If i had to develop a new app that has to run on both platforms, i would develop/ test it for both platforms at the same time in the same app. Thats the biggest advantage appcelerator can give you.