Appcelerator Thinkmobile Blog

Recap of the Appcelerator Platform Launch Live Stream

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:59:00 GMT

Enterprise Webinar: Imagine the Possibilities of Enterprise Mobility

Shubhra Sinha — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:44:00 GMT

Mobile is driving fundamental shifts in the market at an unprecedented rate. New business models are being created, existing processes are being re-imagined and the user is king.

Imagine the transformative possibilities for the enterprise when a mobile app becomes business critical: unlocking new efficiencies, competitive advantages and revenue streams. We'll discuss how real customers have re-engineered their business processes through a mobile lens to deliver amazing ROI. Register here!

Imagine the Possibilities of Enterprise Mobility

Date: Thursday, May 30th

Time: 9am PDT

Presenter: Lyla Kuriyan McInerney is Appcelerator's VP of Marketing.

The Rule of Three for Enterprise Mobile Apps

Michael King — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

So you've come to the conclusion that you need mobile apps for your company (or someone else has decided that for you, and its now up to you to implement). You know that apps can create a more robust user experience for your customers and improve the productivity of your employees, and you're excited about the idea of mobilizing your business. You've taken the first big step, on your mobile journey and now all you need to do is figure out what’s the best way to start building.

You're making a wise decision; mobile technology in the enterprise has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years, for someone who has been in this industry as long I have been, it has never been this much fun. In our Appcelerator Q1 2013 Mobile Enterprise Report, enterprise leaders we surveyed said mobile innovation is critical because of its significant effect on:

Customer and employee relationships
The enterprise’s ability to compete
Top line revenue growth
Bottom line asset efficiency

It is smart business to invest in mobile strategy, but what's the best way to get started? When you first begin mobile app development for your company, you have the option of choosing one of two directions:

1. You can build a custom “one-off” native or mobile web application, each time you need a new app or update your current ones

2. You can make a strategic investment in a mobile platform that will allow you to build multiple apps, across many operating systems and app architectures (mobile web, native, etc.) and re-use components across all of those apps

The first approach requires less of an initial investment and commitment, but it is problematic if you want to create more than one app or make updates in the future. The second approach needs more time and funding to get started, but it is often a more affordable long-term strategy. Which is right for your enterprise?

This is a common dilemma many business and IT leaders face. To make a tough decision easier, I developed what I call the Rule of Three when I was a mobile analyst at Gartner, and I’ve revised and honed it here at Appcelerator.

The Rule of Three

You should choose Option #2, investing in an infrastructure-based, strategic approach, if:

You are going to build three or more applications

You are targeting three or more device classes or operating systems

You are going to be making three or more updates to an app in the course of a year

Benefits of Employing the Rule of Three

The Rule of Three is a long-term strategy that results in lasting benefits:

You do all the hard work up front. Yes, you must first make an initial investment to purchase and learn new software and methodologies, but this effort will save you time and money in the long run. You create a single code base with reusable frameworks and widgets, so you can build countless mobile apps without reinventing each component/framework each time, across all of the operating systems and architectures you require.

You deliver consistency. When your mobile app development takes place on a standardized platform, you are able to make changes to apps or backend data services that reflect across all devices and operating systems at once. Instead of having to make a change to an iOS app, and then separately make the same change to an Android app, you can do everything at once. This is simpler and more cost-effective for your business.

We employ the Rule of Three constantly with our clients, and they continue to see the benefits in action. For example, when we built a mobile app for NBC, it was targeted to four different devices - Android tablets, iOS tablets, iPhones and Android smartphones - and required multiple updates each year. NBC took the recommendations of the Rule of Three and opted for this infrastructure-based approach. Building the app for multiple devices on the Appcelerator Titanium platform resulted in: faster update cycles, cross-platform efficiency, scalable development and huge overall cost savings.

At Appcelerator, we believe in creating a mobile strategy that will contribute to your company's success now and far in the future. We work with you to identify your specific goals and priorities, then help you choose a course of action that ensures you will get the most out of your time and investment. The Rule of Three is just one of our many tried-and-true strategies; are you ready to find out more?

Contact us and see what we can do for your business.

The Evolution of Mobile in the Enterprise: The Road to the Cross-Platform Framework

Neeraj Gupta — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:09:00 GMT

Technology moves fast. Understanding how the mobile space has developed can help us understand where we are today, and why we need the tools and capabilities a modern development framework can provide. Here is an outline of how the mobile ecosystem evolved to the present day.

BlackBerry or bust. It wasn’t that long ago that when an enterprise needed mobile devices for some of its employees, it would buy BlackBerrys, set them up, and issue and maintain the devices and apps. Employees had no say in the matter, and the devices and apps were for official use only. The user experience was tightly controlled. Those were simpler times. Centralization made things easy for corporate IT, and it worked. Never mind that the user experience was typically not very good; there was no alternative. Employees lived with whatever capabilities and limitations were built into the enterprise’s choices.

The mobile minority. In addition, since employers bore the entire expense for the devices, applications, provisioning, and IT support, they typically would make mobile devices and applications available only to those employees with traditionally “mobile” jobs, such as sales or on-site service personnel. Other employees remained tied to their desktop computers or dependent on bulky laptops for travel.

Enter the iPhone. Apple changed everything with the iPhone. For the first time, people were willing to pay $199 (with a contract) for their very own device, because for the first time there was a device that offered a compelling and satisfying user experience. The number of mobile apps for productivity, communication, and entertainment mushroomed, and before long the iPhone and iOS themselves had competitors. And all of these devices and applications provided better experience than corporate mobile phones.

You can’t get toothpaste back in the tube. It quickly became apparent that it was not practical for employees to carry two phones, one for personal use and one for official use. As soon as it was possible to do so, employees started to use their personal phones to access corporate networks and applications. Enterprises tried to stem this use of personal phones but found it impossible or impractical to do so.

Bring your own. At the same time, IT learned that employees’ use of personal phones came with a significant benefit: It allowed the enterprise to reduce the costs associated with procuring, provisioning and maintaining devices for their staff. So BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) became an accepted practice, even if sometimes unofficially.

Security. To address the security issues that arose with BYOD, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) companies stepped in. These firms supported BYOD initiatives and helped enterprises keep corporate information as secure as it could be in a mobile environment.

Multiplicity. BYOD had a profound impact on how enterprises designed and developed mobile applications. They could no longer build an application for a particular mobile operating system. Instead, they had to support the most popular operating systems and devices used by employees. Finding it cost-prohibitive to build, test, and maintain applications for multiple platforms, they began a frantic search for a cross-platform solution.

Web apps to the rescue? HTML5 emerged as the apparent savior, but enthusiasm was short-lived because of performance issues and browser fragmentation. In addition, employees were not pleased with the user experience in web applications. In the end, even companies like Facebook and LinkedIn abandoned their HTML5 efforts. It was now clear that enterprises needed to build native mobile applications.

Overwhelmed. The problem with building native applications is that it involves dealing with multiple operating systems, multiple development languages, multiple form factors, and multiple user experiences. To compound the problem, enterprises typically do not have the skills in-house to build mobile applications using these new development environments.

Today’s cross-platform world. That's why cross-platform development frameworks like Appcelerator have gained popularity. They make it much easier for companies to use existing web resources to build native applications that target multiple platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Tizen, Mobile Web, etc). Appcelerator allows enterprises to build connected secure native mobile applications and satisfy their desire for rich native UI.

My next post will show you how the Appcelerator platform solves a variety of problems enterprises face in the mobile space.

Watch a demo to see our open, cloud-based enterprise platform in action.

Enterprise Webinar: Old-school MEAPs for the Mobile Revolution? No Chance!

Shubhra Sinha — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:35:00 GMT

Traditional mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) were built in a pre-smartphone era to mobilize desktop or web applications to a BlackBerry or WAP device. However, today's mobile apps require a different app deployment strategy. Modern smartphones need to consume data from multiple sources, which traditional MEAPs cannot support.

Only with the scalability and flexibility of the cloud can an enterprise hope to harness the massive opportunity that mobile represents. Join us for this webinar featuring Appcelerator CTO, Nolan Wright, and Appcelerator's Director of Enterprise Strategy, Michael King, as they present their point of view on the requirements, value and potential of mobile first clouds. Register here!

Old-school MEAPs for the Mobile Revolution? No Chance!

Date: Thursday, May 9th

Time: 9am PDT

Presenters: Nolan Wright, Appcelerator's Chief Technology Officer and Michael King, Appcelerator's Director of Enterprise Strategy.

Enterprise Webinar: What Does 'Mobile First' Really Mean?

Shubhra Sinha — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:23:00 GMT

There is a lot of hype about becoming "Mobile First" these days. But what does Mobile First really mean to an Enterprise? Is Mobile First your first mobile application – No! Is it only about BYOD policies – No! Is it about extending your existing desktop apps to run on a Mobile device – No!

Mobile First in the enterprise means re-thinking your business processes, your organization and your IT architecture through the lens of mobility. It provides companies with the ability to disrupt markets, gain a competitive advantage and increase efficiencies at an unprecedented rate. Join our webinar with Michael King, Appcelerator's Director of Enterprise Strategy, to learn more about the 'Mobile First' opportunity for the enterprise. Register here!

Michael King, Appcelerator's
Director of Enterprise Strategy

What Does 'Mobile First' Really Mean?

Date: Thursday, May 2nd

Time: 9am PDT

Presenters: Michael King, Appcelerator's Director of Enterprise Strategy, helps companies plan and execute a scalable mobile strategy. Previously, Michael spent 11 years as the lead mobile analyst for Gartner.

Webinar: No More Ugly Enterprise Apps!

Shubhra Sinha — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:34:00 GMT

Mobile First enterprises have realized that the end user is king. Users now expect superior user experiences and innovative functionality, even from enterprise apps. Consider the alternatives: low adoption rates, abandoned environments, employee frustration and the risk enterprises face by employees taking matters into their own hands by circumventing the firewall.

The Design-Driven Development phase of Continuous Mobile Innovation is focused on quickly executing short iterations between ideation, design and development that result in a cross-platform application with an amazing native user experience. Join this webinar to hear Fred Spencer, Enterprise Design Lead at Appcelerator, present best practices and real examples of apps with immersive user experiences created using a Design-Driven Development approach. Register here!

This is the fourth in a series of four Continuous Mobile Innovation webinars. Continuous Mobile Innovation is a new approach for creating, delivering and analyzing mobile apps. It consists of three phases all optimized for the realities of a Mobile First world: Design-Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and Experience-Driven Analytics.

No More Ugly Enterprise Apps!

Date: Thursday, April 25th

Time: 9am PDT

Presenters: Fred Spencer, Enterprise Design Lead at Appcelerator

Native vs. HTML5 – looked at objectively, the debate is over

Jonathan Rende — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:45:00 GMT

Almost a year ago I wrote a white paper about Native versus HTML5 mobile app development, asking ‘Which option is best?’

Even then, the answer was pretty obvious: look at the question objectively, using a set of clear comparisons, and HTML5 is crushed by native development, even though HTML5 wins on a few points.

Strangely, though, the debate rages on. Just this month, ReadWrite’s Brian S. Hall felt the need to discuss “The Facebook Phone & The Triumph Of Native Apps Over HTML5” as if the issue had yet to be settled.

You could argue that triumph was already clear last August, when Facebook itself abandoned HTML5 for its rebuilt native iOS app. But bloggers and consultants continue debating the question, and customers still ask me about which way they should go.

Why are we still having this debate? My take is that it’s like a religious war, where people aren’t really interested in debating the actual facts. If you do take a serious, evidence-based look at the data that’s available, though, it’s not hard to settle the issue once and for all.

The power of numbers

A good place to start is with app growth. A recent round up in Information Week counted 775,000 apps now available in Apple’s App Store and roughly the same number in Google’s Play Store. Add the 135,000 claimed by Microsoft and Blackberry’s 100,000, and you get 1,785,000 native apps in the marketplace.

It’s harder to quantify how many HTML apps are out there. But in a 2012 Appcelerator survey of 3,600+ developers working in both the native and HTML5 space, we found that developers were actively writing roughly 6% of their applications in HTML5. Even if you assume that HTML development has always been as popular as native and then double that figure for a wide margin of error, the total number of HTML5 apps now available still would only just clear 200,000.

Shear volume is on the side of native solutions, then, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that that’s shifting. App downloads, meanwhile grew 11% in Q1 2013 over Q4 2012.

Nine points of comparison

But there are plenty of other ways in which native- and HTML-developed apps get compared. In my research, I’ve found nine of points of comparison where it’s possible to make objective calls as to which is superior:

1) Rich user experience (native wins)

85% of mobile professionals in a March, 2013 Compuware survey preferred mobile apps over mobile websites. One of the main reasons was the richer experience users get with native apps. Features like VR, NFC, and passport simply aren’t available in HTML. Where HTML has 30-50 native device capabilities open to it, native developers have access to 6,000-7,000.

2) Performance (native wins)

When it comes to both loading and rendering, whether you have good, weak, or terrible internet access, native is always faster. Click on a calendar event in a native app, for example, and it opens instantly. The time it takes to do the same in an HTML app typically drives people nuts.

3) Monetization for developers (native wins)

Recent numbers from Canalys report that native app developers’ combined income in Q1 2013 was $2.2 billion. In contrast, the monetization available to developers building HTML5 apps is essentially zero. It’s pretty obvious, then, that financially ambitious app owners need a massive incentive to move out of the app store fold.

4) Cross platform development costs (HTML wins, but by less than you’d think)

This is usually seen as a big point in HTML’s favor. The line is that you ‘write once, run anywhere,’ and that’s true, but only up to a point. You certainly have to factor in costs for going native for multiple OSs, although solutions like Appcelerator will help reduce those costs significantly. But they are not zero with HTML5, either, thanks to the next point of comparison: fragmentation.

5) Fragmentation challenges (a wash)

If it’s a challenge to develop apps for multiple platforms (and for different versions of those platforms), even with Appcelerator’s help, it’s not the case that developers writing for the mobile web are writing simply for one HTML5. There are at least 15 mobile browsers in existence, each available in different versions and each supporting different levels of HTML. So there’s a fragmentation challenge with both. On this measure, the two are pretty much a wash.

6) Availability of programming expertise (HTML wins)

There’s no debate here. There are millions of HTML developers out there who will look at HTML5 and say, ‘eureka, I can now develop mobile apps.’ Objective-C, meanwhile, and to some degree Java, are much harder to learn, and people who know them are harder to find and cost more to hire. Again, solutions like Appcelerator’s address this by using JavaScript, a language that pretty much every web developer knows well, but the overall comparison still favors HTML5.

7) Immediate updates & distribution control (HTML wins)

Mobile is all about constantly innovating. Because they don’t sit on the device, HTML5 apps can be instantly updated. In contrast, having to go an app store for an update remains a barrier to offering the best, most up-to-date experience. A win, then, for HTML.

8) Timely access to new OS innovations (native wins big)

Apple and Google offer, on average, 1-3 updates a year that offer major new capabilities. When they are making so much money from their app businesses (see #3 above), they have every incentive to coral those new capabilities within their native OSs and zero incentive to offer them in HTML. Meanwhile, it takes years for the HTML consortium to ratify new standards. At the rate at which device manufacturers are innovating, there’s no way that the HTML consortium can move swiftly enough to compete.

9) Security (native wins big)

People are increasingly worried about security, especially as mobile moves ever further into the enterprise and, frankly, there is no way that anyone could say that HTML is more secure than a native app. Native clearly wins thanks to:

- the security of the source code of itself; browser source code is open for all to see, and to then work around.

- the security of data at rest on the device; on a native app, it’s completely secure. In HTML, the browser is typically not secure and as a result exposes the data it’s accessing within its caches.

- the security of data in transit; when using HTML, you are pretty much restricted to using SSL. VPNs are just too slow. With native apps, you can also run VPNs and other encrypted solutions, without ruining performance.

- URL security vulnerabilities; these are unique to web applications and beloved by hackers. Native apps simply don’t have them, so hackers can’t get into native apps in the same way.

From my perspective, that last set of comparisons are the final nail in the HTML5 coffin. It’s clear that from a security perspective, native is the only way to go.

Overall, it’s a strong 5 to 3 win for native development, with one comparison a wash. The icing on the cake is the shear number of native apps now out there and the low current developer interest in building on HTML5.

Looked at objectively, then, the world has already spoken on native versus HTML5, and it’s bizarre that some people seem to be confused about this still.

At Appcelerator we continue to support developers however they want to build their apps and we believe that HTML will continue to have value in niche areas. But we also believe that success and innovation is built on a solid grasp of the facts; and here they indicate a strong advantage for native development, and have done for a while.

Given the evidence, it makes you wonder: why are we even debating this any more?

Jonathan Rende is the VP of Products at Appcelerator.

Webinar: Using Experience-driven Analytics to Improve the Success of Your Mobile Apps

Shubhra Sinha — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:10:00 GMT

Do you have the insights that you need to improve your mobile apps quickly and accurately? Development teams spend weeks building new mobile apps, which are released with great anticipation. Once in production, however, most enterprises struggle to understand how they perform, what features are being used the most, where the problems are, and how to improve them for subsequent releases. They rely on superficial data such as the number of downloads, app store ratings and user comments, and are powerless to take actionable steps that will meaningfully improve business success and user adoption.

Appcelerator's new approach, Continuous Mobile Innovation, provides Experience-Driven Analytics to enable informed business decision-making by providing deep insight and visibility into the deployed apps and user behavior. Join us in the Using Experience-driven Analytics to Improve the Success of Your Mobile Apps webinar, where Simon Berman, Sr. Director of Product Marketing will discuss this new approach and share real customer examples for driving mobility success with Experience-Driven Analytics.

This is the third in a series of four Continuous Mobile Innovation webinars. Continuous Mobile Innovation is Appcelerator's new approach for creating, delivering and analyzing mobile apps. It consists of three phases all optimized for the realities of a Mobile First world: Design-Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and Experience-Driven Analytics.

Using Experience-driven Analytics to Improve the Success of Your Mobile Apps

Date: Thursday, April 18th

Time: 9am PDT

Presenters: Simon Berman, Sr. Director of Product Marketing

Webinar: 5 Secrets to Deploy Secure Apps Your Employees Will Love

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:40:00 GMT

Join Appcelerator and MobileIron for this webinar! As enterprises increasingly mobilize their employees, mobile apps for employees are storming to the front and center of corporate priorities. Securely building, deploying, and managing mobile apps isn't impossible! In this webinar, "5 Secrets to Deliver Secure Apps Your Employees Will Love," Appcelerator and MobileIron share 5 best practices for creating and delivering applications that are secure and exceed user expectations.

Deployment is a critical component of the Continuous Delivery phase of Continuous Mobile Innovation. Learn first-hand from 2 leading mobile enterprise software experts, Michael King (Director of Enterprise Strategy at Appcelerator) and Sean Ginevan (Director of Business Development at MobileIron), about how Mobile Application Management and Mobile Device Management coupled with a Mobile First platform leads to more secure and higher impact applications for enterprises through Continuous Mobile Innovation. Register here!

This is the second in a series of four Continuous Mobile Innovation webinars. Continuous Mobile Innovation is a new approach for creating, delivering and analyzing mobile apps. It consists of three phases all optimized for the realities of a Mobile First world: Design-Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and Experience-Driven Analytics.

Presenters:

Michael King, Appcelerator's Director of Enterprise Strategy, helps companies plan and execute a scalable mobile strategy. Previously, Michael spent 11 years as the lead mobile analyst for Gartner.

Sean Ginevan is the Director of Business Development for MobileIron. Prior to MobileIron, Sean held marketing, editorial and engineering roles with Cisco Systems, InformationWeek, Network Computing and AOL.

Appcelerator & MobileIron present: 5 Secrets to Deploy Secure Apps Your Employees Will Love

Date: Thursday, April 11th

Time: 9am PDT

Presenters: Micheal King & Sean Ginevan

Appcelerator Platform Pricing Updates

Jeff Haynie — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:31:00 GMT

I am personally committed to openness and transparency regarding our pricing and licensing. When I announced the new Appcelerator Platform last week, I mentioned that I was going to follow-up to provide you with details about the changes that we are making to our Plans & Pricing. As I’ve said before, we care deeply about providing you with outstanding value and high quality products at competitive prices. This has been our commitment from the day Nolan and I started this company. One of our core company values is to “Enable Customer Success,” and we are honored each and every day to empower you to deliver transformative mobile experiences to the world.

To be clear, Titanium will continue to be free and has no commercial restrictions. For our free “Explore” package, we significantly boosted the monthly allotments of Cloud Services and Analytics recently in order to give the majority of our developers a free “all-you-can-eat” offering for their mobile apps. We created this strategy to better serve the needs of our community, and the feedback we received was extremely positive. Recently, we also posted answers to some of the more common billing and usage questions.

With regards to the Appcelerator Platform, we’re focused on the specific needs of mobile enterprises. As you are well aware, mobile is exploding and disrupting everything. We have seen increasing demands from Mobile First enterprises for specific requirements across the entire mobile application lifecycle as they scale from 10s to 100s of apps (and beyond). The Appcelerator Platform provides a commercial solution for the entire mobile lifecycle, with commercial support, SLAs and technical training. This offering includes Appcelerator Studio, Appcelerator Alloy, Appcelerator Cloud, Appcelerator Test, Appcelerator Analytics, and Appcelerator Performance Management – all under a single, newly branded SaaS offering called the Appcelerator Platform. This solution serves the specific needs of enterprises that require a comprehensive platform for the entire mobile lifecycle - from ideation and design-driven development, to continuous delivery, to experience-driven analytics. We'll also offer enterprise-class flexibility in the delivery of the solution both as a public cloud and virtual private cloud along with varying levels of guaranteed availability (SLAs).

The Appcelerator Platform is powered by Titanium. In other words, we can’t have the Appcelerator Platform without a strong, successful Titanium product and community behind it. We will continue to invest in it, and there will always be a free / open source version of Titanium. This truth is very important to me, so I would appreciate it if you would take the time to read my blog post from last week where I wrote in detail about our commitment to open source.

Appcelerator Platform Pricing

The pricing model we are using with the Appcelerator Platform is designed to be simple, scalable, and value-driven.

We've created a new pricing model that includes unlimited mobile applications. In short, our new pricing model is no longer licensed by number of applications.
- Platform customers can build, deploy and manage as many apps as they like, whether they are transient or long-term; B2B, B2C or B2E apps.
- The primary attributes are the number of platform users and the number of unique test devices.
  - A user is any named user with a username and password who accesses the platform - including designers, developers, testers, release managers, project managers, DevOps personnel, managers, executives and Line of Business owners.
  - The test device license typically represents the different kinds of mobile devices and OSs being tested.
  - Note that end users of the deployed mobile apps are NOT considered users in this case.
  - The starting price for the platform is $999 per named user/month, and includes:
    - The base foundation of the platform,
    - Up to 10 million push notifications and API calls per month,
    - 100GB of storage per month,
    - 5 test devices, as well as
    - Annual subscription with a minimum of 5 users.
    - The price of the platform scales linearly from there at $250/user/month for each additional user or test device.

What Happens to the Standard, Enhanced and Premium Packages?

With this new platform and pricing model, we’re now also retiring the three packages known as “Standard”, “Enhanced” and “Premium" all of which were licensed by application. If you are one of the commercial customers already on one of these packages, we'll continue to honor your existing subscription until the end of your term. At that point, our corporate sales team will work with you on an upgrade path to the Appcelerator platform.

To be clear, the free “Explore” package with the above-mentioned usage-level increases and existing licensing terms will remain unchanged to allow the continued use and adoption by our developers who are the engine that fuel the mobile revolution.

As mentioned in the ACS billing and usage questions, we'll also provide an upgrade path to the Appcelerator Platform should you outgrow the Explore package.

Thank You!

2013 promises to be another landmark year for all of us – our developers, customers, partners and Appcelerator. We’re excited about the opportunity ahead, and are looking forward to doing some really big things together! Thank you again and let us know your feedback in the comments below. For pricing questions, please contact us here.

Introducing the Appcelerator Platform

Jeff Haynie — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:38:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we launched a redesigned website to celebrate our epic developers and customers, and to provide customized content for each group. Today, we are making some product changes to provide more clarity about the difference between our open source and commercial offerings.

Our commitment to Open Source

I recently returned from a three-week trip around the world to meet with you – our community and our customers. One thing that I heard over and over again in my conversations at TiConf in Valencia, Spain and TiTokyo in Japan was that many of you are building successful businesses on your Titanium apps. I was amazed by your stories about the demand for your apps from enterprises and your journey to becoming successful entrepreneurs. You truly are changing the way the world communicates, and I am honored that you have chosen to build your businesses on our solutions.

I also heard requests for more clarity about what is open source/ free vs. what is commercial: When do you need to pay? What is the value that you get if you pay for our solutions? Are we going to make any changes to limit (or eliminate!) our open source/ free offerings? What happens if you exceed the free limits?

To be crystal clear, there will always be a free / open source version of Titanium. This is a sacred truth, it is in my heart, and you can count on me to always cherish and protect it. Open source and free are core to who we are, it is the soul of the company and we will continue to invest in it. Our goal is to democratize the mobile revolution – to enable all developers and all enterprises to create the future. To achieve this goal, we must always provide a great free product because we believe that developers are the engine that will fuel the mobile revolution. We want you to start businesses, to build transformative mobile apps, and to be successful. It is our belief that a free and open source Titanium is the key to making these things happen.

Titanium and Appcelerator Branding Changes

Starting now, we are going to start making a clearer separation between the Titanium suite of products (which will all be free) and the Appcelerator suite of products (which will all be commercial).

Certain products today that have a free tier, such as Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS), will be rebranded over the next few months as Titanium Cloud. The paid offerings for ACS will now be available and branded under the Appcelerator brand.

Moving from the Titanium products into the commercial offerings will be seamless. And, you’ll already be familiar with them, given that they are built on the same foundation, but with additional capabilities more suitable for enterprises that need those features.

Of course, we wanted to “release early, release often” – so we’ll need a few months to work through all of the changes to reflect them more fully on the website, products, etc. I ask you for a little patience as we do this.

Introducing the Appcelerator Platform

Today, we are announcing the Appcelerator Platform. This offering focuses on the specific needs of mobile enterprises.

The Appcelerator Platform provides a commercial solution for the entire Mobile First lifecycle, with commercial support, SLAs and technical training. This offering includes Appcelerator Studio, Appcelerator Alloy, Appcelerator Cloud, Appcelerator Test, Appcelerator Analytics, and Appcelerator Performance Management – all under a single, newly branded SaaS offering called the Appcelerator Platform. This solution serves the specific needs of enterprises that require a comprehensive platform for the entire mobile lifecycle - from ideation and design-driven development, to continuous delivery, to experience-driven analytics. (We refer to this redefined lifecycle as Continuous Mobile Innovation.)

The Appcelerator Platform is powered by Titanium. In other words, we can’t have the Appcelerator Platform without a strong, successful Titanium product and community behind it.

Titanium will continue to include Titanium Studio, the open-source projects such as Titanium SDK, Titanium CLI, Titanium Code Processor, Alloy for Titanium, and community-driven enhancements; all coupled with flexible and non-restrictive licensing (Apache 2) to allow you to develop and sell your apps for free. Titanium will also include the free versions of our cloud offering. Titanium allows us to continue to collaborate through various pull requests, JIRA, wiki and other wonderful ways to all work together to make this an awesome product for all.

What’s coming next?

My commitment to you is to be transparent and open about our plans. Thus, let me outline the direction that we are taking:

Our website launch today features a new homepage that clearly defines the difference between what is free/open source and what is commercial: Titanium and Appcelerator Platform. We’ve launched detailed product pages for each solution, as well as online demos of the Appcelerator Platform.

In the next few days, look for another blog post where we outline the commercial pricing for the Appcelerator Platform. To be crystal clear, the free “Explore” package with the existing free usage-levels and existing licensing terms will continue unchanged.

We plan to continue to make a cleaner separation between the Titanium suite of products and the Appcelerator suite of products. In 2-3 months, we will launch a separate website for Titanium and all of the open source/free resources (forums, community, etc) associated with Titanium. At that time, Appcelerator.com will focus entirely on the Appcelerator Platform and the commercial offerings associated with it. We also plan to launch a free trial for mobile project teams that require a comprehensive enterprise-grade mobile platform.

Thank you for your support

I’m going to be completely honest with all of you right now (and please don’t take this the wrong way), but I was pleasantly surprised during my trip by the reception by the community of my discussion around commercial vs. free and the Appcelerator Platform vs. Titanium branding changes that we are making today. I received many compliments including tweets of excitement around that. Admittedly, I was a bit worried that perhaps our community would be a little skeptical – but quite the opposite, you were encouraging and thankful to see that Appcelerator has a path to commercial success, and that we were providing you with the clarity around plans that you have been seeking.

Forgive me for being sappy here, but I was truly touched by how you all want Appcelerator to do well. I saw how you are rooting for us to grow and be commercially viable as you are staking your careers and businesses around our business. So thank you for your support.

As always, I am honored each and every day that we have the opportunity to empower you to deliver transformative mobile experiences to the world. Let me know your feedback!

Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) - Frequently Asked Usage & Billing Questions

Simon Berman — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:46:00 GMT

As many of you know, a couple of months ago we made some significant changes to the pricing of our Cloud Services and Analytics packages. We boosted the monthly allotments of both, giving you - for all intents and purposes - an all-you-can-eat offering for any mobile app – all for free. We made these changes to better serve the needs of our community, and the feedback we received was extremely positive.

Over the last few weeks, several questions have been asked around the general usage of ACS for this free tier, so I wanted to address and clarify them here:

1. Is there an availability SLA for the free tier of ACS?

Although the service is provided as-is with no guarantees or formal SLAs, we do strive to keep the service up and running and available. We monitor the underlying services and infrastructure and have a DevOps team that responds to real-time alerts and notifications. We’ve also made a lot of progress over the last few months in bringing the overall availability and reliability of the service up several notches.

To read the ACS terms of service license agreement, click here.

2. Do we enforce the ceilings of the free tier, and what happens if my app exceeds the monthly allotment?

As a quick reminder, the current free ACS plan provides the following metrics (per month):

5 million push notification
5 million API calls
20GB of storage
100,000 emails

We know that many of you are building sustainable businesses and the predictability factor for forecasting is important. Although this ceiling is very generous and most apps will probably never get close to it, there may be some that reach or even exceed it. In such cases, ACS will initially continue to function uninterrupted and we will not disable the service; meaning your mobile app will still work as expected.

We do keep track of the monthly usage of the allotted metrics (push notifications, API calls, storage and emails), and if one or more of them is exceeded in a given month, you’ll be notified by email of the overage. Our policy is to provide you with a grace period for that first month and no further action will be needed. If however, during the following month the app again exceeds one or more of the allotted quota, you’ll be notified again and this time our corporate sales team will engage with you to explain the upgrade options to a paid/commercial plan.

3. What does the paid/commercial plan offer?

If your application usage is expected to continue to grow, the corporate sales team will likely introduce you to one of our select Partners who will help you transition to the Appcelerator Platform. This upgrade will provide you with double the cloud services usage ceiling (per month) as follows:

10 million push notification
10 million API calls
100GB of storage
200,000 emails

In addition to these increased usage limits, you’ll also get additional functionality such as enterprise capabilities (including automated testing and performance management), as well as guaranteed and higher service levels for both technical support and cloud services availability.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Appcelerator Platform, please contact us by clicking here.

Summary

Keep the questions and feedback coming, we do appreciate it and we’re committed to ensuring your continued success.

Enterprise Mobile Apps – How to Maximize ROI Without Sacrificing Performance or Features

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:53:00 GMT

This is a guest post by Brian Blankenship, a Senior Mobile Solutions Provider with Clearly Innovative, Inc. Brian is an experienced mobile developer, as well as a certified project manager with experience and certifications in agile development. He has developed apps for various industries including the federal government.

Overview: Many organizations are spending time and money to develop mobile apps – often for multiple platforms (e.g., iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.). What they often do not know is that cross-platform tools exist – allowing an app to be written in one language, one time and ‘published’ to multiple platforms, rather than hiring multiple developers or teams.

Introduction

Many organizations today are releasing or considering the release of an ‘app’. The explosion of mobile devices and capabilities over the last few years has quickly offered many business cases for delivering content and functionality to mobile users, whether they are potential customers, current customers, employees are members. There is no ‘going back’.

However, while organizations that have been ‘early adopters’ of this new medium have often reaped the rewards many times over, questions now are starting to turn back to evaluating the time and cost of such efforts. Those questions not only revolve around the initial development, but also around the ongoing maintenance of these ‘apps’.

Compounding the question is the sheer number of different devices, operating systems, and device features. Early on in the ‘mobile revolution’, an organization could create an iPhone-only app and be applauded by their customers or constituents. Now, users expect an iPhone app, an Android app, an iPad app, a BlackBerry app or more. The issue is that these platforms require vastly different toolsets and code (see table below). That means developers with very different knowledge and skillsets. For your organization, this naturally translates into more resources – more people, more time and more money.

Platform	Programming Language	Tool
iPhone	Objective-C	Xcode
iPad	Objective-C	Xcode
Android	Java (Android flavor)	Eclipse
BlackBerry	Java (BlackBerry flavor)	Eclipse

Cost Impact:

Suddenly, organizations must face several options to handle the various platforms:

Option A: Hire a consulting firm that has programmers for each platform

Option B: Hire multiple consulting firms – each with their own expertise on a given platform

Option C: Hire multiple internal programmers, each with their own ‘niche’ expertise on a particular platform

Option D: Only choose a single platform and risk alienating a customer or user population.

None of these are attractive options, although many organizations have internally justified them, or forged ahead before questioning the approach.

Time Impact:

At this point, an organization may have several development teams working simultaneously, or they may have one team (e.g., ‘the iPhone team’) developing an app first and then the second team (e.g., ‘the Android team’) waiting to do their work when the first team is done.

The problem then becomes, what if there is a change that needs to be made? Or, what if there is a bug?

If both teams are working simultaneously, the changes or bug fixes must be duplicated – that’s right – twice. (More often for bugs they will be different types on different platforms – further complicating the matter). The needed changes must be communicated to two different teams of people – increasing the chance that the results will not be the same, or at least ensuring it will take even longer to make sure they are the same.

If the organization had the Android team waiting to begin after the iPhone app was complete the impact could be even worse. If a bug or needed change is discovered while the Android app is being created, is the iPhone team still around to fix it? Have they rolled on to another project?

In addition, there can be an opportunity cost with having a lag between releases of your app on different platforms. Are you losing ground to a competitor that already exists on the other platform? Or later enters the market on that platform before you do?

The Solution

To combat this issue, cross-platform mobile development tools have emerged over the last few years. They allow apps to be developed for multiple devices and operating systems by writing code in one language and toolset. The code is then essentially just ‘published’ to each platform (with minor tweaks and differences as needed or desired).

Using a cross-platform tool offers many benefits:

More economical launch by saving cost on the initial development
Quicker launch by saving time on the initial development
Reduced cost of ongoing maintenance
Faster enhancements and bug fixes
Simplified staffing
Easier knowledge transfer
Reduced lines of code – even if you only want an app for one platform
Typically written in a web-based language (e.g., JavaScript, HTML), making it easier to later train an internal web-development team for ongoing maintenance

Leading Cross-Platform Tool: Appcelerator Titanium

Probably the best example of a cross-platform tool is Appcelerator Titanium. Launched in 2009, Titanium was one of the first to provide the ability to quickly create cross-platform mobile applications and has since steadily grown and been enhanced to become the most widely-recognized tool in its class. Consulting firm Gartner has recognized Appcelerator as a ‘visionary’ in the mobile space. There are competitors such as PhoneGap, but they typically involve running the app in a ‘webView’ (read: embedded browser), which generally offers slower performance – not only limiting user experience, but also limiting the complexity of apps that can be safely created. In addition, this embedded browser approach ‘mimics’ native controls rather than delivering actual native controls – providing a less appealing visual look and a less responsive touch.

Not only does Appcelerator Titanium offer cross-platform native controls, but they also offer extensions through ‘Modules’. What this means is that additional features and functionality can be ‘plugged in’ without having to write the code from scratch. This saves further time and cost during the development and maintenance phases and allows the rapid addition of features.

Currently, there are more than 350 modules available for Appcelerator Titanium, with more with more being added everyday. Here are just a few examples:

QR and Bar Code Scanning
PayPal
AdMob
DropBox
Push Notifications
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google Analytics
3D Graphics

In addition, Titanium can be used to create apps for the emerging Android tablets such as the Nook Color, Nook Tablet, and the Kindle Fire – to reach an even larger user base and set of demographics. To even enhance the business value further, Titanium offers the ability to use the same codebase yet again – to publish a web version of the app in HTML5.

Who Uses Appcelerator Titanium?

Large enterprises such as NBC, Merck, ZipCar, PayPal and eBay – just to name a few.

Also, these days, roughly one in every 3 apps submitted to the App Store was developed in Titanium.

There is a wide range of types of organizations and individuals that use Titanium – clearly signifying that it’s not just for large corporations and it’s not just for solo hobbyist programmers. The benefits in time and cost savings have been recognized at all levels and through various types of organizations around the world such as corporations, non-profits, healthcare organizations, and federal agencies.

What are the drawbacks?

If your app concept relies mostly on intense 3D graphics or 3D gaming, Titanium may not be the best platform for you (but that has started to change with the development of the Appcelerator gaming engine by Lanica). However, there are not many limitations beyond that – there couldn’t be if over 50,000 apps to date have been published using Titanium. One common misconception we do hear often though is that cross-platform tools force your app to look and behave the same across all platforms – which could confuse users and degrade the experience. This is not true – you do not have to make your apps look exactly the same. With Appcelerator Titanium, you create native controls for each platform – meaning a tab or a button on iPhone looks and behaves as one should on iPhone; and a tab or a button on Android looks and behaves as one should on Android. You can of course tailor your app to each platform as much as you desire. Back to the misconception though – you could certainly make the apps be identical if you desired, but that choice is up to you.

Summary

Developing a mobile app for your organization is an investment, just as any other technology initiative is. You must evaluate the business proposition – how much do you expect to earn or save by having the app – and how much is that worth to you? In addition, if you are creating an app for multiple platforms, you need to consider how much you will spend to develop apps for those various platforms. For most organizations, it would be difficult to justify creating apps for multiple platforms with wholly separate teams, skillsets and code. Cross-platform tools fill that ‘common sense’ gap.

About the Author

Brian Blankenship is a Senior Mobile Solutions Provider with Clearly Innovative, Inc. He is an experienced mobile developer, as well as a certified project manager with experience and certifications in agile development. He has developed apps for various industries including the federal government.

Clearly Innovative, Inc.

Clearly Innovative, Inc. is a certified small business and a premier provider of mobile technology solutions for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, HTML5, Windows 8, Nook and Kindle. Based in Washington, DC and founded in 2009, Clearly Innovative has developed dozens of apps and serves clients in various industries such as the Federal, DoD, Commercial, Social Media, Non-profit arenas. Clearly Innovative specializes in mobile app development using the Appcelerator Titanium platform, which essentially allows code to be written once and ‘published’ across multiple platforms – drastically reducing time and cost throughout the development lifecycle. Clearly Innovative is an official Appcelerator Gold-Level Integration partner, with many certified mobile app developers and deep expertise on the platform. In addition to bringing top-notch mobile expertise, Clearly Innovative brings solid project management and process improvement expertise to support a solid and lasting solution.

Japanese Titanium Developers come out in force for tiTokyo

Greg DiPaolo — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:11:00 GMT

Why Mobile App Testing Requires a New Approach and How We’re Doing It

Simon Berman — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 03:27:00 GMT

Today, as we were delivering our live webcast to the business press, industry analysts, technology bloggers, and enterprise customers, I was watching the mobile testing demo with great interest. After spending over half my career in automated testing (12 years at testing pioneer Mercury Interactive), I couldn’t help notice the similarities with our old 90’s era WinRunner with its nifty record/replay technology, verification points and context-sensitive test scripts.

But then it also struck me that there are some fundamental differences between the testing of the business processes of applications like SAP and Oracle for enterprise (desktop) users, and today’s mobile apps. Sure, the underlying technology today is different, as is the delivery mode (now via the cloud) and the user experience, but there are more substantive ones too:

1. Testing vs. Quality

Testing in those days was never considered a glamorous discipline. QA used to be considered low on the corporate totem pole; the engineer wannabees, the naysayers, the ones who invariably stood in the way of releasing new products and services to market. The business would commonly shove in some more features to the release expecting that users would thank them for giving them so much functionality! “If it doesn’t work, we’ll patch it in the next release” was the mantra.

The CEO certainly didn’t know much about Testing either – if anything, it was just an impediment standing in the way of delivery. So are we really surprised that over 50% of all IT projects failed to be delivered on time, on budget and on requirements?

Today, I guarantee you that every CEO whose company has one or more mobile apps (whether for customers or employees or partners) is keenly aware that the quality of those apps is of paramount importance, and can make the difference between successful adoption and failure. They may still not know much or care about testing, but they certainly do care about Quality. The quality of the user experience, the design, and the function is now the overarching theme that takes precedence over everything else. Better to keep the app brain-dead simple with high utility, than a monster app with low usability. Quality is now an integral part of the delivery lifecycle, and QA (Quality Assurance) has evolved to QE (Quality Engineering), with a direct impact on the success of the business.

2. Release Cycles: Months vs. Days

When enterprises rolled out new versions and modules of their ERP/CRM systems, release cycles were literally measured in many months, even years. It wasn’t uncommon for a U.S. rollout to take 18 months, followed by another 18 months for subsequent regions. Changing timelines from the business to roll out new versions, coupled with engineering feature-creep meant that testers were constantly struggling to figure out what to test and when to test it.

In a previous blog (“Nothing is certain except death, taxes and a short mobile app lifespan”) we discuss how mobile enterprise apps need to be focused on a small feature set targeted around a specific set of needs to be successful and that the best approach is to write apps that users want and need right now. Most likely these apps won’t even live more than a year or two in total, and that’s after going through multiple iterative releases in between. So from a testing perspective, the feature set is much more defined.

Today, with agile development practices release cycles are down to days or even hours. With cloud development and DevOps teams, the line between development and testing has become blurred. Everyone is developing and testing at the same time, and the traditional model of testing purely as a discrete event prior to release is no longer valid.

3. Desktop vs. Mobile Devices

How simple life was when we had a corporate standard for the enterprise desktop; one brand of manufacturer (Dell, HP), one operating system (MS Windows), and one certified browser (Internet Explorer) – all governed and controlled by IT. Worst case was that there were a few supported browser versions, but by and large the number of end user platforms on which the apps would run was very small. This made the testing far more manageable since the number of permutations was so small.

With mobile today, there are literally hundreds of permutations to test for based on device manufacturer, platform, O.S., versions and display size. Factoring in the Android fragmentation (iOS fragmentation is also starting) and pretty quickly the list of testable permutations starts to get messy. On top of that, enterprises require a legitimate solution for testing that doesn’t involve jail-breaking or backdoor tomfoolery.

Requirements for Mobile Application Testing

The automated testing of today’s mobile apps therefore needs to be suited for this new world. The key requirements include:

Automated capture/replay (without jail-breaking)
Support for multiple platforms and device types
Integration with the development environment for rapid and continuous testing

Today Appcelerator announced a partnership with SOASTA the leader in cloud and mobile testing as well as a joint integration between Titanium and SOASTA’s TouchTest. We’re also now selling this solution under the name Appcelerator Functional Test as a new part of our platform. This, we believe, will provide our enterprise customers with a strategic advantage in their pursuit of business-transforming mobile apps.

Here’s what George Mehok, CIO of Safeguard Properties, the largest mortgage field services company in the U.S, had to say about this new solution and why they’re adopting it now:

“We’ve adopted mobility as a key enabler to providing productivity enhancing technologies to our nationwide network of contractors and inspectors, in addition to delivering superior quality to our clients. As an innovator in mobility, we’re actively implementing the integrated solution between Appcelerator Titanium and SOASTA TouchTest to further optimize the quality of our apps, reduce development cycle time, and accelerate adoption.”

If you’re interested in learning more about this, watch the recent webinar.

Mobile Initiatives Transforming The Enterprise in 2013

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:53:00 GMT

We just released Appcelerator’s first Mobile Enterprise Report and it is packed full of insights about mobile priorities and investments in businesses in 2013.

We surveyed 770 enterprise leaders about their mobile development priorities and their perceptions of emerging trends in mobility. This report enables enterprises to compare their mobile initiatives with those of their peers, and to understand major mobile trends emerging in the enterprise. Our mission with this survey is to provide a report on the state of the mobile enterprise and to identify the most important mobile investments that are transforming businesses in 2013.

To view a full version of the report, click here. The report’s key findings include:

2013 will be the year when the number of new mobile applications will surpass the number of new desktop applications.
Enterprises view mobile as transformative and believe it will have substantive impact on top line revenue growth, customer and employee relationships, the enterprise’s ability to compete, and bottom line asset efficiency. However, many enterprises are struggling with decentralized mobile application strategies and a lack of internal mobile leadership.
Most enterprises have cleared the hurdle of the first mobile app, and the majority of enterprises are targeting to build 5 or more mobile apps in 2013.
None of the major traditional IT and software vendors are showing leadership in mobile, leaving the enterprise to take the reins themselves. However, few enterprises have made the organizational investments necessary to be successful.
Enterprises state that they are planning to build employee-facing mobile apps in 2013, and also believe that user experience matters as much for B2E/ B2B as it does for B2C apps.

The report indicates that enterprises believe that mobile provides the opportunity to change everything for their businesses: including new ways to enable employees, new ways to communicate with customers, and new business models. Appcelerator has seen repeatedly that those companies that make the organizational and technology investments to support a mobile-first approach receive highly positive results.

Mobile App Development More Important Than Desktop and Will Outpace It, Yet Mega-Vendors Unprepared:

While traditional enterprise application development has been focused on the desktop and the web, 72% of enterprises surveyed think it is “likely to very likely” that mobile development will outpace web and desktop development in 2013. Moreover, 87% of respondents state that more mobile apps will be delivered than desktop apps in the next year.

However, respondents stated that none of the major IT vendors are showing leadership in the mobility space. In fact, of the top five vendors, Microsoft (as a company, not just its OS) was viewed as demonstrating the most leadership, but still only a meager 28.3% of respondents stated that Microsoft is showing leadership in mobile. The other four mega-vendors have even worse leadership perceptions in mobile, being viewed as leaders only by 15.8% for SAP, 10.8% for Oracle, 7.3% for IBM, and 4.6% for HP.

The Mobile App Floodgates Are Opening

The majority of companies surveyed have passed the first mobile application hurdle, with 61.5% stating that they have built and launched over 2 apps already. Furthermore, a few companies are investing heavily in mobile, with 10.8% of those surveyed stating that their company plans to build more than 20 apps in 2013.

Mobile Is Important To Enterprises, But Few Are Staffing For Top Mobile Leadership

Respondents recognize the transformative power of mobile with 80% of enterprise leaders predicting that mobile-first companies will disrupt mature industries in 2013. In addition, 55% of companies rank mobility at the top or near the top of their list of strategic priorities.

However, despite this high prioritization of mobility and the recognition of the impact it will have on the bottom line, very few companies are actually treating it as a strategic priority. Few have established a centralized body for ideation and oversight of mobile projects. Even fewer are adding senior mobile-specific job titles to their payrolls.

iOS and Android Reign As Top Enterprise Platforms

Enterprises are most interested in developing applications for the iOS and Android platforms. Apple’s iOS reigns as the top platform of choice, with 80.1% of respondents “very interested” in developing for the iPhone and 79% “very interested” in developing for iPad tablets. Interest in developing for the Android platform is also high, with 64.4% “very interested” in developing applications for Android phones and 52.4% for Android tablets.

User Experience is a Top Requirement

A resounding 85.6% of respondents stated that user experience is just as important for B2E and B2B apps as it is for B2C apps. This heralds the fact that we now live in a user-experience-centric world where beauty, functionality, and user delight triumph, whether for mobilizing internal enterprise processes or for transforming consumer relationships.

Employee-Facing Mobile Apps Starting to Take Off

66% of respondents stated that their companies are planning to build employee-facing apps in 2013. This has a significant impact not only on the connectivity of the application and the complexity of its integrations, but also on how the enterprise will administer and secure those connections.

Do Enterprises Have A Comprehensive Mobile Strategy?

Less than half the companies surveyed have a comprehensive mobile strategy, despite their above-mentioned reasons for investing in mobility. 44% have a comprehensive mobile strategy; 22% are unclear on the business case for one; 30% lack the time or resources.

We asked those enterprises what the biggest obstacles are to creating and implementing a mobile strategy. The responses were not surprising: 54% Resources; 41% Lack of tech standards; 26.5% Lack of clear direction or strategy.

Please download Appcelerator’s Q1 2013 Mobile Enterprise Report to read the detailed findings, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney is Appcelerator's Vice President of Marketing

An Epic New Website To Celebrate YOU -- Our Epic Developers and Customers!

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:34:00 GMT

Appcelerator just launched a redesigned website to celebrate the two groups that we are honored to empower with our mobile-first platform: developers who want to impact the world through their mobile apps, as well as enterprises that want to transform their businesses with mobile

For the past few months, we've been working with a website design firm, Digital Telepathy, to develop a look and feel that more closely embodies the values that our mobile developers, our enterprise customers and Appcelerator all represent together – crusaders for beauty, innovation, impact and ROI in order to change the world.

While at first blush one may think that mobile developers and large enterprises have nothing in common, you’ll notice that our homepage celebrates the linkages between these two groups. Our rotating top banner speaks to ideals that are cherished by both audiences: having the power to create in order to bring your beautiful visions to life, having the power to impact in order to drive effectiveness and ROI, and having the power to inspire to affect the whole world with mobile apps. We searched and searched through photo archives until we unearthed stunning black and white images of some of the most creative (Wright Brothers), impactful (Jesse Owens) and inspiring (Jimi Hendrix) innovators of all time that broke new ground, as you are doing in these early days of mobile.

Continuing down the homepage, we present content that demonstrates the amazing traction and success that our developers, customers and Appcelerator are delivering together to the world: case studies of impact with mobile, blog posts, the number of mobile innovators in the developer community, the total devices that are running an Appcelerator-powered app, the number of apps in stores, as well as tweets to feature your opinions.

[Today’s total devices stat means that your apps powered by Appcelerator are on over 10% of the world’s smartphones. Congrats on attaining such strong mobile app adoption on your apps!]

The homepage also provides a jumping-off point for developers and enterprises to dive deeper into more tailored content. We created two new portals, one for developers and another for enterprises.

The enterprise portal provides thought leadership to help enterprises learn about how to be successful with mobile, no matter what stage they are at in their mobile maturity. Companies new to the mobile enterprise revolution will find material to help them imagine the possibilities of mobile. We also present webinars, whitepapers, blog posts, case studies and customer testimonials for companies who are ready to define a mobile strategy, enable mobile-first business transformation with processes and technology, as well as disrupt their entire industry with mobile.

Developers now have one place to find everything from documentation and training materials to meetups and other ways to engage with the community. Stay tuned for more updates to come soon to make it easy for community members to get involved as well as to tell their stories to the world.

You’ll also see improved descriptions of our products that make it more clear what our solutions do, how they can help you, and why they are different from the alternatives.

Of course, the entire site is responsive and designed to work across mobile devices. We also created a new nav bar to make it easier for you to find information and navigate quickly to deeper content.

We’re not even close to done yet, so keep on the lookout for iterations and new upgrades coming regularly. Please explore our new site and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Lyla Kuriyan McInerney is Appcelerator's Vice President of Marketing.

2013 New Year’s Resolution – An Enterprise Mobile Center of Excellence

Michael King — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:17:00 GMT

At the beginning of every New Year, many of us look back at the year that was, and in looking forward we often make New Year’s resolutions for personal improvement. From an enterprise mobility perspective, there are a few parallels with this approach that I’d like to share.

Many organizations spent the past few years trying to figure out how to leverage mobility to reach their customers while realizing business value along the way. More recently, they’ve started to focus on employee facing apps in order to enable and improve employee interactions. By all accounts, 2013 will be the year that mobility becomes even further entrenched in our personal and business lives.

As with many new technologies, deployments have been tactical across different projects, with inconsistent adoption and standards throughout the organization.

Most enterprises today have addressed mobility and mobile applications in a somewhat piecemeal fashion - IT supports many of the security and governance issues (with MDM and MAM software), while the lines of business drive the application priorities (with or without IT buy-in). In the long term, this will reduce the enterprise’s ability to move quickly, and cost significantly more from a maintenance and build-out standpoint. In order to tackle the transformative technology of mobility and truly embrace its power to fundamentally change how they do business, enterprises must go beyond the individual mobile projects.

The first step in the strategic approach is oftentimes developing a centralized body for evaluation, standardization, and ideation of mobile opportunities. While the notion of a Center of Excellence has been around for quite some time, the Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE) is a relatively new construct.

The mobile-first companies that we’ve worked with have already embraced this construct, enabling them to move quickly with the technology and identify opportunities for business transformation. We’ve taken the learnings from those client engagements and put together a whitepaper for other enterprises to use as a guideline for the establishment of a centralized body with the express purpose of mobile governance and enablement.

So take a few minutes to download and read the whitepaper. Who knows, this may help you to make your professional New Year’s resolution!

Pricing Updates for Appcelerator Cloud Services and Analytics...

Jeff Haynie — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 05:00:00 GMT

As I wrote last October, I am personally committed to openness and transparency regarding issues concerning our pricing and licensing. We care deeply about providing you with outstanding value and high quality products at competitive prices. This has been our commitment from the day Nolan and I started this company. One of our core company values is to “Enable Customer Success,” and we are honored each and every day to empower you to deliver transformative mobile experiences to the world.

Over the last few months, many of you have provided us with valuable feedback on the pricing of our free and commercial packages regarding Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) and Analytics.

We listened closely to what you said.

As we begin 2013, we are pleased to announce substantial changes to the pricing of these various packages, effective immediately:

1. App Explore and Commercial Accelerate Packages

The free App Explore package, which previously included ACS monthly metrics of up to 100 Push Notification Devices, 500,000 API calls, 5GB of storage and 10,000 emails has now been increased to: 5 million Push Notifications, 5 million API calls, 20GB of storage and 100,000 emails.

The free App Explore package, which previously included Analytics metrics of up to 50,000 events per month has now been increased to 1 million events per month.

The commercial Accelerate packages (Standard, Enhanced, Premium) have also been increased to include the same monthly levels as above for both ACS and Analytics.

If you are an existing customer currently subscribing to any of the commercial packages, you will immediately and automatically inherit these new changes!

Note that at no point will your entitlements go below what has been purchased.

2. Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) Standalone Pricing

The standalone incremental pricing structure of ACS has also been dramatically simplified into a single free tier (per application) as follows:

All values are monthly, per app

Metric	Old	New
Push Notifications	100 (pushed devices)	5 million
API Calls	500,000	5 million
Storage	5 GB	20 GB
Emails	10,000	100,000

3. Appcelerator Analytics Standalone Pricing

The standalone incremental pricing structure of Analytics has also been changed as follows:

All values are monthly, per app

Metric	Old	New
Events	50,000	1 million

Please note that if you exceed any of the expanded limits above, you will be proactively notified by us and our sales department will be ready to assist you with the right commercial package.

For more information

We will be hosting a live webinar on Thursday January 10th to review these changes in more detail and provide you with an opportunity for Q & A. To register for the webinar, click here.

Check out the updated Plans & Pricing page.

Everything we do starts with enabling your success. We are committed to being open and transparent with you regards to our pricing, and providing you with significantly more value (up to 20 times more in this case!). We can’t wait to share more about what new innovations we have in store for you in 2013! Stay tuned for more.

Thanks,

Jeff Haynie

CEO, Appcelerator

Airport Chatter App Spotlight - A Global Airport App for Travelers

Simon Berman — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 03:20:00 GMT

As we approach the end of 2012, the data is in that more Americans are traveling this end of year than last. AAA projects that 93.3 million Americans will journey 50 miles or more from home during the year-end holidays, with the number of those traveling by air increasing by 4.5% over last year.

The average airport has three terminals, 18 airlines, 40 eateries, 30 shops, 25 services, three lounges, public transportation, taxis, limos, shuttles, long-term parking, short-term parking and an array of hotels nearby. So the recent launch of Airport Chatter comes at a very opportune time.

Airport Chatter is a free mobile app that aims to help travelers quickly locate what they are looking for and display where the venue is located. It provides information, tools, reviews and interactions aimed at making air travel a more pleasant experience in the busiest airports in the U.S including LAX, DFW, ORD, and JFK.

The app currently features profiles of every eatery, shop, service and lounge at those airports — more than 6,000 venues in total at 53 airports — helping travelers learn about which restaurants there are after security is cleared or what the costs are for long-term parking. It also includes a social capability to allow users to rate venues and provide reviews. The upcoming Radar feature will allow users to find other users at the same airport who can then either chat through the app or meet up live.

The app was developed by Ygor Lemos and two colleagues using Titanium. It also leverages Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) for push notification. The app currently runs on the iPhone, with the Android version coming out soon.

Ygor notes, “Since the app was released three weeks ago, we’ve had over 2,000 downloads and a lot of press coverage. People really like the user interface and the simplistic tab bar approach. Without Titanium it would have taken three times the amount of development time, not to mention that the code is so much easier to read, maintain and update.”

Coming soon are profiles for more airports in international markets such as Latin America and Asia as well as additional services such as baggage tracking, flight tracking, airport wifi services and coupons.

To learn more about the Airport Chatter app, click here.

To download the iOS app, click here.

Secant App Spotlight - Home Automation Control Using ACS

Simon Berman — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:55:00 GMT

When we talk about next-generation mobile apps, we infer a certain amount of practical utility and value realization. Sure, first generation apps like Angry Birds and Words with Friends kept us entertained, but their functional value is questionable. The Secant Home Automation app, however, is about as next-generation as it gets.

Developed by Underlabs in Montreal, Canada, this app lets homeowners with the Secant CARDIO home automation system control all aspects of their house, including lights, appliances, curtains, heating and air conditioning, and the alarm system. Using Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) as the underlying middleware, the Secam system allows homeowners to now control these entities securely from any location – whether at work, on the road or on the sofa in front of the TV.

The Secant Home Automation app is available on multiple platforms including the iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Android tablet, BlackBerry and desktop. Feedback to date on the app has been extremely positive and marketing activities are in play to deliver it to 20,000 homes.

Joseph Zibara, of Underlabs notes, “We evaluated numerous other MBaaS offerings before standardizing on Appcelerator Cloud Services. No other solution had either the breadth of services available, nor the ease of use in building secure connected apps. With the Appcelerator solution we can build cross-platform apps significantly faster than any other environment, which makes us much more competitive.”

This innovative use-case of ACS leverages several of the pre-built MBaaS services including custom objects, key values, users and email templates. Commands issued by the user from the mobile app are sent to the ACS system. Hardware in the wall-mounted (and internet-connected) controllers poll the ACS system with its unique credentials to securely retrieve the commands which are then acted upon in the house.

To learn more about the Secant Home Automation system click here. Customers can download the iOS app here, the Android app here and the BlackBerry app here.

To learn more about Underlabs, please visit their website at: http://underlabs.ca

Announcing Titanium 3.0 And The Year That Was...

Stephen Feloney — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 23:13:00 GMT

As we wrap up the year 2012, I’m pleased to announce what is undoubtedly the most significant release of Titanium, version 3.0. It's also a time to look back at the year that was and take pride in some of our achievements around Titanium and our thriving developer community.

Some of the highlights include:

Developer community now exceeds 400,000 registered developers worldwide
Over 50,000 apps publically available
Titanium apps now deployed on over 90 million devices (66% growth in 8 months)
Over 320 Marketplace Modules available in the first year
Over 1,400 enterprise customers including eBay, Merck, Mitsubishi Electric, NBC, PayPal and Ray-Ban

With the new Titanium 3.0 release we focused on the following key themes:

Accelerating developer productivity from initial download to app creation
Improved scalability and efficiency of code to promote reuse and maintainability
Delivering higher quality apps

One of the key capabilities of Titanium 3.0 is Alloy, a Model-View-Controller (MVC) Framework. Alloy essentially decouples the visual components of the app code (in an XML-like format) from the business logic making the code significantly easier to read, manage and re-use. After 4 months in a community pre-release format, we had over 11,500 downloads and an enormous amount of positive feedback.

Alloy helps all of our users, from the novice developer to the most advanced Titans. As one of our Titan’s, Jongeun Lee, recently shared: “I’m happy to share this amazing development experience. It took ONLY 40 hours to develop the CC10Musicians app. This wouldn't have been possible without Titanium and Alloy.”

Using Alloy, developers can build out a library of components (widgets, business logic, skins, etc..). Over time, this facilitates the creation of an “app factory” allowing them to quickly stitch together these proven components to create higher quality apps even faster. Novice users can also get up to speed even faster by leveraging our built-in sample Alloy templates. To read the Alloy docs, click here.

Regarding application quality, in Titanium 3.0 we’ve introduced on-device debugging. This allows developers to further improve the realism of the code testing and validate the actual user experience on the device. It also means you can test specific features of the app that rely on device-specific functions such as the accelerometer for movement, GPS for geo-location services and even phone calls. Also, since many device simulators aren’t available until some time after a new device ships, on-device debugging helps deliver apps for these new devices quicker. To read the debugging docs, click here.

Titanium 3.0 also includes a new CLI (Command Line Interface) aimed at helping developers improve their automation by integrating into their own development tools such as editors and continuous integrations platforms. This allows developers to automate common activities such as build, run, and directory cleanup right from the command line. To read the CLI docs, click here.

All in all, we added over 170 new features and enhancements in this release. Read the Release Notes for those additional details.

For new users, download Titanium 3.0 by clicking here.

For existing Titanium Studio users, you will be prompted to update automatically on the next restart. You can also manually check for updates by selecting the "Check for Titanium SDK Updates" from the "Help" menu within Titanium Studio.

I would like to thank our development community for all the help, support, and feedback they have given us in delivering this latest release.

Nothing is Certain Except Death, Taxes and a Short Mobile App Lifespan

Stephen Feloney — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:10:00 GMT

When it comes to traditional enterprise applications, the average release cycle of a web or desktop application can often be 12-18 months (and sometimes even longer), and its lifespan can be well over 15 years. With regards to functionality, these applications are often bloated, to the point of becoming unusable. What’s worse, we actually only use 20% of the total functionality.

With these applications, long planning cycles were needed to ensure all the new features for each and every corner case could be crammed into an already large, archaic and outdated application - not to mention the periodic architectural refactoring that often needs to occur.

With the advent of agile development, some thought it would help to rectify this situation. However in most cases agile has merely served as a catalyst to add to the ever-growing code base at a faster rate. This has led to more features, reduced usability and a code base that is even more complex and difficult to manage.

With enterprise mobile applications, we have a very different dynamic. These apps cannot take a “one size fits all” approach; their evolution is inherently iterative, the lifecycle is dependent on succinct user requirements, and the developers must have a maniacal focus on the end user experience. By their nature, mobile enterprise apps need to be focused on a small feature set targeted around a specific set of needs. You’re in trouble if you’re looking to create the “Microsoft Word” of mobile applications. Such behemoth apps simply won’t be used on mobile devices and any organization that thinks that all they have to do is “port” their enterprise applications to mobile devices are on a sure path to failure.

Your customers/users have a new set of expectations when it comes to mobile apps. Neither the iPhone nor iPad come with a user manual, and people expect to use the apps instantly and without any documentation or training. They also expect to have a pleasing user experience, with an intuitive and dynamic UI. Their expectations for the enterprise apps are driven by their experiences as consumers. They will continue to use their personal mobile devices and expect to access the enterprise data with the same user experience as their consumer apps.

Mobile devices are changing on an almost daily basis, with the addition of a wide range of new capabilities such as Near Field Communication (NFC), GPS, high-resolution cameras, credit card readers, and mobile coupons. These changes force companies to modify their applications to leverage these features. Since mobile applications are activity focused, adapting them is not as daunting of a task as it was for the old beasts of yesteryear. Jerry R. Geisler III, Senior Director in Information Systems Security Operations at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. agrees, “Mobile apps have a much shorter lifespan than other enterprise applications.” In fact from our own research across hundreds of enterprises, it appears to be a mere 14 months before an enterprise mobile app gets rewritten, and during that time at least 3-4 updates of that app will be produced.

So what does this mean? Enterprises should plan for the future of their mobile applications, but develop them for today. Traditionally the building of enterprise applications would be done in a way that would allow for expansion and modification for the very long-term (i.e., years ahead). This inevitably increased the development time. Yet, in the majority of cases, when the code was modified this future-proofing was actually a hindrance to the changes.

Develop and plan your mobile apps for what is needed today. Sure you should build in modularity to facilitate reuse. But don’t handicap your apps by trying to develop for a future that is completely unknown. We just can’t predict which platforms and architectures will be dominant in the future, so the best approach is to write apps that your users want and need right now. Most likely these apps won’t live more than a year or two. As such, you should make sure your mobile platform not only provides for rapid cross-platform app development, but also that it facilitates a modular approach to enable component reuse for future apps.

“Carpe Diem!” or perhaps “Codex Diem!” (“Code for today!”), because the only things in the future that are certain are death, taxes and a short mobile application lifespan.

New Titanium Barcode Scanning Module from Scandit makes M-Commerce Easy

Spencer Chen — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 04:13:00 GMT

Today we’d like to share an awesome new Titanium module created by our friends at Scandit. With its high-performance barcode scanning and product data services, the new module is perfect for a variety of B2C, B2B2C and B2E mobile commerce use cases. Titanium developers who are building apps that need to interact with everyday products or any barcoded object will find that everything they need is packaged neatly in this easy-to-use module. Relevant use-cases include point-of-sale, procurement, inventory-management, ticketing, price comparison and shopping apps, among many others! Here’s the breakdown:

Scandit Community Edition Features:

FREE for all free B2C mobile apps
Support for UPC, EAN, and QR codes
Unlimited scans and devices
Web-based support
Access to Product data through Scandit’s API featuring over 25M UPCs*

Scandit Enterprise Edition Features:

Flat-rate plans start at $99/month for all B2B2C and B2E mobile apps
Support for UPC, EAN, Code39, Code128, ITF, QR, Datamatrix and PDF417 codes
Variable device limits with unlimited scans
Premium support with response time of 48hr or less
Access to Product data through Scandit’s API featuring over 25M UPCs*

Download the Scandit module today to get started!

And this is just the beginning. Scandit is constantly building out their offerings with additional mobile commerce services and is excited to learn more about how they can support the needs of Titanium developers as they move forward. Get in touch with them to share your questions or ideas.

To sweeten the deal for Titanium developers and in celebration of their 3^rd anniversary, Scandit is offering 3 months of free services for all new yearly Enterprise plan sign-ups through December 7^th! 3 years old and 3 months free, it just makes sense. Titanium developers should jump on this great offer and the Scandit team will be there to support you all the way!

Stay tuned for a detailed webinar which will take an in-depth look at some of B2B2C and B2E use cases which are perfect for Enterprise apps.

*The free Bronze edition of Scandit’s Product API includes a 35 query-per-hour limit and a maximum of 5000 unique UPCs per month. See their API pricing for higher-volume access to their API.

Spencer Chen heads up ISV & Ecosystem partnerships at Appcelerator. He loves the social web, anything mobile, and TMZ. If you have a really cool service for mobile apps, you need to call him!