Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skue 5549 days ago
So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples.

Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think they'd have nailed this much, right? Sadly, no. Check out all the forums posts about people struggling to get KitchenSink running:

http://developer.appcelerator.com/questions/search/kitchensi...

Some of that is the complexity of getting the right 3rd party developer tools installed. But often projects will randomly stop compiling. Instead of fixing the underlying problem, this is their workaround (it's not just KitchenSink, it happens to your projects too):

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/53821/kitchen-sin...

They don't seem to have anyone who monitors their forums. When core functionality breaks and people report it, nothing gets done about it for months, even when the fix is as simple as whitespace. This was reported in Oct, and a pull request was submitted in Jan.

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/82691/run-on-devi...

It was finally fixed last month:

https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/commit/510fc...

Open source means the community should be able to pitch in, but there are 16 open pull requests from the last 2 months, none closed or even commented on:

https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/pulls

New features are rolled out with sparse documentation and then abandoned. Need to style a bunch of views, try JSS - except it's not documented in detail anywhere. But maybe they dropped JSS and are working on Helium?

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/91331/jss---class...

Or not. Helium hasn't been updated in months and still isn't documented anywhere on the Appcelerator site. So who knows.

There are many other issues, of course. Ultimately you end up having 3 options: (1) pay them a bunch of money for support, (2) spend more time fixing their software then working on your own code, or (3) just writing native apps for the various platforms (or native web wrappers with HTML core).

I wouldn't mind paying for support if the product worked great, but paying to get support for something that's broken to begin with is frustrating. It's ultimately easier to just find alternative technologies.

3 comments

Forgot one other big issue that no one seems aware of: Appcelerator tracks your development with their tools. Titanium Developer transmits analytics data every time you create/import/edit/delete/compile/test/install/distribute a Titanium project on your system.

To see the specific calls, just download titanium_developer and grep for Titanium.Analytics.featureEvent. If you do use Titanium and want to disable this, you should build a new version of Developer after adding the following line to tiapp.xml:

  <analytics>false</analytics>
One last note: I don't make these points just to be mean-spirited. Appcelerator clearly has some talented programmers and great technology. But silent tracking isn't okay, and clearly someone at top needs to help them focus the talent they have.
Agreed. Seems like they are wasting away what once had great potential. All my bug reports (3 over the past two years) still stand unanswered and unacknowledged.

The API is broken in many ways. Documented features just refuse to work, and forum and bug posts go unanswered. I assume that paying customers have a better experience, but if they could be a little more responsive and helpful to prospective customers like me, I'm willing to bet they'd have a lot more paying customers.

Yup, exactly! My own attempt at a contribution is just fixing some arithmetic <https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/pull/80>; and it's going nowhere...