To renew or not to renew, that's a hard one

General
21

“If you want progress, invest” … seems to me that this doesn’t work for most tech companies. If you invest, they get fat, slow and pricey, if you don’t they just stay slow.

Because what Xojo does is using its spare resources for years to try adding Android as another platform onto a product that already suffers from too many of them and is essentially broken beyond repair. I never asked for Android, nor did I ask for iOS, nor did I ask for Raspberry Pi. Who did, btw?

Just to put “progress” into a perspective: Xojo announced Android support in 2016! And in 2018 they said:

We just reached a milestone in our efforts and we now have code from the Xojo compiler running on both the simulator and real Android hardware.

Do we have Android support in production yet? No! Wait, it is 2023, is it? Where did your Android-based business idea go while you spent >$4.200 in Xojo licenses “waiting for progress”?

Let’s have a look at the Component Library. Did you see any “new features” or significant changes there or do we still have the same old components we had 10 years ago? Is the WebListBox still the same old limited WebListBox or can I do serious stuff with it? No, I can’t. To do serious stuff with Xojo you need to buy relatively expensive Plugins which have yet another yearly license attached to it.

Can I send an asynchronous HTTP Request and attach a callback to it? No, I can’t! Because Xojo is still stuck on the Visual Basic style-90s where we needed to declare static Event handlers for any async behavior.

There are literally hundreds of bugs that urgently need fixing but Xojo needs to “announce” yet another cool half-baken feature to keep it attractive for newcomers to buy their licenses while they ignore their existing, loyal customer base.

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22

@Dana_Brown , can this be moved to Off-Topic, where it belongs? Thanks.

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23

No, @TimStreater, we can’t because this is as on-topic as it can be. Silencing concern is not the solution.

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24

@Louis_Brauer1 : It seems to me you blame Xojo for your wrong choice of a business model.

We use Xojo (/RB/RS) Pro since 2007, I think. We developed six major apps with it (seventh underway) and we earn a lot of money with them. Much more then the $700 for the Xojo Pro. That’s the basis.
When the Raspberry Pi became available, we connected six Raspberrt Pies to the Internet and provided a back-up service for our costumers. Which is also a worthwhile business.

As for needed plugins we buy MBS Dynapdf about every four or five years.

I know there are a lot of bugs, but we do not encounter a lot of them or can work around the ones we do encounter. Xojo does do it’s job. That’s why we pay for the Pro every year.

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25

@Ivan_Tellez You’ve put a lot of work into documenting and posting these bugs in the tracker. Unfortunately many of them are not fixed.

Many in the Xojo community don’t want to hear what you or I write. For them, Xojo is a product to be loved, and so they close themselves off to legitimate criticism. This in turn creates that echo chamber where it’s comfortable to pat each other on the back instead of critically examining the needs of your own clientele.

I for one will not renew my Xojo license for the time being and am currently looking around for alternatives. Since I only maintain one large and two smaller Xojo web applications anyway, it is not irreplaceable for me.

I’m sure this post will be quickly forgotten. The wheel of time keeps turning and we’ll see how Xojo has evolved by then.

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26

If you’d said that up front, you could have saved everyone a lot of time.

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27

I don’t understand why you bought XOJO.

When you create a business, you don’t do it with the tools that will come in the future, as if it were a bet in Las Vegas.

I use the tool because it is fully functional and without errors in my systems. I use it on a day-to-day basis.

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28

I’m sorry you see us this way. I mean the XOJO users.

Of course, your comments about us are not welcome.

I love that technology advances. And it gives me a competitive advantage using the technology.

I have developed Android applications with Android Studio and Swift with Xcode. It seems to me that it has its advantages but also many disadvantages. Without comment on web development.

I am happy to say that it is easier to maintain, develop and release applications on XOJO. With all its limitations, it is a powerful tool.

29

Firstly, I’m a Xojo user myself. Over the course of the last 15 years I purchased 4 licenses minimum. And I created apps literally within days that run retail shop logistics with millions of revenue to this day.

But with my recent web project I painfully noticed that Xojo Web has bugs almost in every component. Not only that, have you tried to use Xojo IDE on Linux? You click on the wrong position in your IDE and it’s crashing. The bug is confirmed and unfixed for nearly a year. That is like releasing a car that goes up in flames when you press the wrong button.

I criticize the management decisions that led to the situation Xojo is currently in. And I think it is legitimate to point out that it is wrong to add more and more features instead of fixing bugs first.

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30

Hyundai/Kia got you covered there, you just need to park it wrong or get it wet…

31

Tesla would like you to hold their beer.

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32

You didn’t share any other usefull informations like:

  • On which platform you are developing? I’m on Windows and Xojo is horrible, reason I’m using it is only to hold in live an old project. Convert it to Visual Studio is not worth.
  • Do you have to share your project with other persons and it must be always uptodate? if yes then one point more to get license.
  • Will it someday be developped by an other person? On mac or Windows?
  • Do you make money with it ? If yes what’s your gain?
  • Most important thing: do you save TIME with the new license? how much is your time worth?

I bought this year XOJO because I converted my old project from Realbasic 2012. This means 1 license in 11 years. Realbasic runs much better on Windows than XOJO and management’s decision to add new features instead fixing the bugs is terrible wrong. Xojo community is not like the others and it seams they don’t understand it.
File a bug and your are treated like it’s not a bug but it’s written somewhere in the guideline that is has not to work.

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33

Dear Louis,
I’m using Xojo since the beginning of the history of RealBasic, at that time made a revolution simplifying the programming and taking a good space in the market.
Have been always expensive but worth the cost, today I face you same problems especially on web programming, many bugs and unstable, over it also the XojoCloud has some issue, and even providing the code no solution came to me.
I started thinking to move to other platforms and languages, there are many solution , just I do not have much time and wish to change and engage, I’m an amateur even with good skills.
On my opinion if your target is web app, you might give a try to some other tools, I know I will, even sorry As Long time ago I’ve been for Clipper… but that is prehistory.

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