With the Appcelerator Platform I am able to build a cross platform application (from one code base project) with extensive native API reach. I love that Appcelerator apps run on the native JS core for the respective platform, making the code I write run more efficiently with less lag than some of the other web offerings for cross platform capabilities. For me, the ability to extend the API is key to our success using the platform. We have unique needs for custom hardware and we were able to write custom native modules to integrate our hardware API into the Appcelerator JS layer. I also use the Alloy MVC framework quite heavily and really like the widgets feature of the platform. We write widgets for UI and core logic to be shared with all applications within our organization. This cuts down on code duplication and speeds up the time to market for new projects. Also a time saver for developers is the integration of Genymotion to the development studio. We have found the native Android emulator to be an impediment to development and Genymotion fills that gap nicely. Genymotion requires only a plugin to eclipse, which is compatible with Appcelerator studio. The extensive developer community is another reason we chose Appcelerator. Its quite easy to find answers online from other users, or ask a question yourself and you will receive an answer in a timely manner. We also subscribe to the paid support access and will ask project specific or critical time sensitive questions there. We have had a good experience with their support staff, if they are not able to solve our problem or find that there is a bug int he API a JIRA ticket is filed and fixed typically in the next patch release.

It is fairly easy to write a mobile app using this software. It is mostly in Javascript, which many developers are familiar with. It's really nice not having to create the same app for each mobile platform and learn the programming language used for each. The "widget" functionality is nice. It's good to be able to package up a piece and share it between apps. I think the sharing part could be a little better but having a separate folder for a "widget" is way better than having to pull out individual files and assets. Appcelerator has fixed some issues for us that made widget packages incomplete, so they have been very responsive to our issues. The crash data is very useful. Appcelerator also offers analytics, though it doesn't seem like the analytics suite is as full featured as a service that purely does analytics.

Once you have a solid base going, it's very easy to bang out apps for all platforms. Widgets are very easy to drop into pages, and the syntax mimicking standard web dev languages and practices (javascript, css, MVC) make it relatively easy to pick up. The documentation for everything is also pretty solid.