I cannot recall the last time I was able to to get support for anything , because of exactly this.
Ebay, paypal, my bank, insurers.
When Covid hit and physical shops/banks began to close/ people moved to working from home, I had a brief hope that phone lines might actually be manned for a change.
‘Both of our staff are on their lunch right now, you are in a queue’
Yeah, I hate this trend… Or when you finally get through to someone, they redirect you to the aforementioned pages, which if they’d helped I wouldn’t be calling. hmpf.
I’m sorry but your posts are just tiresome attacks on Xojo, the team or people who use Xojo. Why are you even here if you hate the product so much. Like I have said before - take your whinging to the ‘other’ forum.
We don’t talk about TOF here, it is violating our rules 
Joke
A lot of customers which are complaining about Xojo, are mostly not complaining about the product, its about the Inc.
Xojo as a tool is stunning. Everyone here says this. Everyone sees its potential and most of them who critize a lot are very passionate about Xojo (the tool). They are critizing decisions which are made, marketing which promises more than the tool can provide and they are complaining about the fokus which the Inc. sets (always newer functions, platforms and stuff, but not fixing bugs, putting effort into the IDE or stability and so on).
So, complaining about the status quo is (in my perspective) totally relatable as far as it doesn’t get rude, hurt feelings or becomes unrelated.
I agree with a lot of what you have written, even in other posts.
Unfortunately, in other cases (excluding you) what you have described here happens.
this was and still is a good thread, even if someone tries to damage it.
Poor quality lead to questioning decisions, in my opinion.
Criticism is very often subjective, but mostly correct from an individual point of view. Each of us has different priorities and a single bug that paralyzes our own business model is of course annoying and I understand that users can be so frustrated that an inappropriate tone is occasionally chosen (even if this bug may not affect many others).
However, I also find that criticism is seldom more effective if it is repeated over and over again in a mantra-like manner. Especially not if you postulate in the same criticism that the company behind it is covered with a Teflon layer and you suggest never using the product again anyway. You simply lose your credibility and waste your own lifetime and that of others.
Every company has to manage its own prioritization and that is never easy. However, from my point of view, Xojo’s communication is not always optimal for such (constructive) criticisms, including e.g. in feedback cases. An answer like “Yes, that seems like a bug, but we have no idea at the moment when and how we are going to solve it” would be desirable. It’s even more annoying when bugs have been fixed, but you don’t know when they will come into production. I think THIS could save both sides a lot of frustration.
However, I’m now also playing the wisenheimer here. As developers, we all know, regardless of how big our projects are, how challenging it is to schedule and communicate bug fixes and, above all, to ensure that one fix does not destroy something else. And we all know too well that existing customers want fewer bugs, but new customers (which are also needed in every sustainable business model) also want new features. It is not easy to find the right balance here.
Actually you got that wrong: new users don’t come for new features (unless you extend to new platforms), they come for the features that are advertised and expect them to work.
But existing users are enticed to upgrade with new features, and want a tool that works as expected and new features that work as expected.
But too often the tool doesn’t work as expected and new features are half-baked (as I had predicted back in 2013 when the Rapid Release Model was introduced) - Xojo became a beta quality product where the hype of new features (ready or not) became the driving force for sales. Xojo was no longer engineering led, but sales led.
And Xojo has committed the cardinal sin that every company has to avoid: don’t neglect your core business.
They had an excellent cross-platform tool for the desktop - but lured by the bigger pond that is mobile they started to neglect it (Windows anyone?) and put their scarce resources into iOS and Android. The problem is that the bigger pond has also attracted bigger fish - and their offerings are not just more powerful but free.
Xojo for iOS was exceedingly anaemic from 2014 (!) till 2021 - that only changed with Xojo supporting plug-ins on iOS which brought the MBS plug-ins over (they are excellent but another cost). Can it compete with the other options out there? Or is it too little, too late? We’ll see. Without MBS the answer would be a definite NO, with MBS they have a SMALL chance - but on balance I don’t think so. And Android? There they compete with Google’s excellent and free offerings.
History is full of examples of companies that branched out, neglected what made them great, and went under. The ones which DID succeed did NOT neglect their core business - because that core business was what made their reputation.
And how do you get a good reputation? Simple: under-promise and over-deliver.
Xojo’s reputation has taken a battering over the last years. And Xojo’s response? Lock down the forum, edit or delete posts you don’t like, ban users. If necessary for 1,000 years. Some even 2,000 years. Does that sound like a healthy, rationale response to you?
Therefore the exodus of many Pro developers. Many of the best known names in the Xojo community have left - and that hurts the whole community because they took a LOT of expertise and assistance (and excellent [open source] projects) with them.
It is not that they don’t like Xojo, and it is not that there isn’t a large cost attached to moving away - but the decisions of Xojo Inc have make it clear that Xojo no longer considers Professional developers its target market (read Bob Keeney’s blog post about that). Changing the language and renaming events basically made over 20 years of accumulated code base, tutorials, video courses, etc worthless. While Xojo stated that API 1 was going to be around for a long while they did nothing to help those that wanted to continue using API 1 - or do you see a simple “Use Api 1 / use API 2 for Autocomplete” choice in the Preferences? On the contrary, autocomplete no longer works for API 1, the doc pages are being removed, etc. - “just go and rewrite your apps in API 2 and Web 2”. Well, if you have to learn a “new” language then why not go for a more powerful one with a lot less bugs where the company doesn’t treat you like an unwanted pest? One which is easy to learn, is not “technical debt”, and … oh, why do I bother.
All I get are excuses like “EVERY new feature has bugs, in whatever language”. Yes. But in other languages those are obscure bugs that rarely manifest themselves. In Xojo you get bugs that should NEVER have gone through quality control as they are obvious (like when they introduced the new listbox header, or the new date control that didn’t stay at the position you put it in the IDE but moved by 5 pixel down when you run the project, or the new MapLocation where whoever implemented it doesn’t seem to understand how Apple’s MapKit works) - which makes me think Xojo has no quality control (has anyone run a project with the date control even once?).
And worse, even obvious bugs can stay unfixed for 10+ years.
It’s not Xojo the language that we dislike - it’s how Xojo Inc treats its customers, the bad decisions they make, and the promises they break. It’s how Xojo morphed from an engineering led company a la Apple under Steve Jobs to a sales and advertising led company a la Microsoft under Balmer.
We are disappointed in something and someone we thought we could trust and rely on. And that is what really hurts.
I did not renew my Pro license this year. My Web 1.00 apps run fine and do what they are meant to do. I am not going any time soon to use a green and tart cute Web 2.00 IMO not up to pro uses yet. Windows with pseudo transparency is near unusable, especially since it would require huge refactoring of my most popular apps. 2016R3 forever!
After being badly burned by Xojo iOS, its idiotic New Framework, and ridiculous limitations (wasted hours and hours to get nowhere), I went to another Basic which actually works for iOS and Android, with outstanding and fast support.
I only got a Mac Desktop license. After years or getting a pro license partly to support Xojo, I have thrown the towel.
Correct, fair point! It’s always good to have a plan B. I have never believed that it makes sense to put everything on just one card (and I try to avoid it), be it software, be it stocks, be it your own career, life planning, etc.
But I’m still surprised that Xojo (to me) is still a reliable and excellent tool (with the power of plugins) for getting many (but not all) tasks done in a very fast manner. With the speed at which all platforms continue to develop, I don’t expect a cross-platform tool to do everything just as well nowadays as the native tools, whether the manufacturer promises it or not, there will always be differences. But compared to other cross platform tools (I tried), Xojo meets a lot of my expectations. It is in the nature of things that not everyone shares my opinion and I can live with it as long as the tool used helps me generate sales and profits.
The fact that so many disappointed users, who seem to have switched to something else, are still so interested in Xojo, at least leads to the conclusion that they have not yet found an alternative that satisfies them 100 percent.
There is a lot that Xojo got right (for one thing an IDE on each major platform, even though it is still less productive than the REALbasic IDE that it replaced) - but what they got wrong has started to outweigh what they got right.
For in-house apps Xojo is fine - I wrote a lot of those and nobody ever complained about it not looking native or even flickering on Windows. But as I am now trying to commercialise some of my apps Xojo’s bugs and neglect of Windows and Linux are hitting my aspirations hard - if one of their main cross-platform competitors had an IDE for the Mac I would already have left, but as it is I haven’t decided yet on how to proceed. I’m still hoping that Xojo gets its act together, and that the new Windows support will be worthy of the name - but past experience tells me not to expect much. So for the time being I’m looking into two other cross-platform alternatives (that other ex-Xojo Pros are raving about), and also dabble in Swift (which I like a lot), and have massively reduced my participation in the two Xojo forums.
So other alternatives may not completely satisfy (eg no Mac IDE), but Xojo in its current state is barely an option, no matter how much I like the language. I would like to stay, but then I would have liked to stay with HyperCard until Apple made it impossible. Now history seems to repeat itself for me.
Let’s agree to disagree on this one. Xojo for iOS does not fit all iOS projects, who would try developing a game such a Fortnite or Pokemon Go using Xojo?! Depending on your app requirements, you can make great iOS apps with Xojo, without using a single plugin.
When I released my first iOS app in 2016 the learning curve was steep, I had to write a lot of declares. But that didn’t stop me from releasing over 10 apps on the App Store, which made million of downloads without using a single plugin.
I have used Xojo for iOS to make productivity apps, small games, a travel app, a skiing app, a video tutorial app, even a dating app.
Out of the box, Xojo for iOS is somehow limited, but there are two major free and open-source libraries out there (full disclosure I made one of them), these were available long before Xojo supported plugins in iOS.
Declares are probably enough for relatively simple apps. However, I tried porting one of my productivity apps to iOS, and finally gave up after wasting months on the project.
I went to another development tool where the huge advantage is that the developer actually provides support in his forum. Instead of the snide “file a feedback”, he provides solutions right away, and if needed, adds features to his product. Compared to Xojo, this is night and day.
I think that is the key.
But that’s the key for a company to stay in business, isn’t it? And no one should assume that open source means free of costs. At least professionals will usually use some paid components.
Depends on the market type… I think developers are less influenced by marketing in the long run and more by the tool’s prowress , stability and reputation
I’m speaking of Xojo Inc. of course, no money for them, no future. Today’s developers are often used to get everything for free (though nothing is for free on this planet), and you can indeed achieve a lot with free tools. Talk to millennials, they often have not heard of paying anything for a development environment 
.
It even applies to a certain extent to the use of Xojo (and most dev tools). You don’t need to use plugins, you can develop your own ones, or find workarounds, but this has a price ticket too, even for private developers. Often plugins cost money but they simplify your life. I like that Xojo has the possibility to integrate plugins, though I’m not happy with the way they are loading.
The city I’m living (Munich) had the fantastic idea to move everything from Microsoft to Linux only to find out after one decade, that they paid more to externals, had angry employees, and a non-working IT environment but indeed no licensing costs. Now they are moving everything back to Microsoft but(!) still believe in opensource and want to migrate many processes to opensource initiatives,
We are on the same page here and having mostly developed for in-house apps this might be my blind spot. Though some users have shown that it is possible to build and successfully sell Xojo made apps, you probably run more easily into show stoppers in such cases. But then again, I don’t see many alternatives. That’s what I mean when I concluded above that a crossplatform tool will have my nature some limitations as you need a common denominator which is already a complex task. But Xojo helped me at least to quickly “test” an idea and then you can still decide to move into a more native dev tool. Some participants in this thread have build a considerably large business on Xojo, that they now might have reached a point, where they have to move on and use something more sophisticated sound logical to me. The big question is, would they ever had achieved this step if they had started with a different tool?
Take Web 2. I have more knowledge in doing Web stuff in other tools than Xojo, but still I’m incredibly fast with Xojo compared to anything else, I can re-use many routines (for creating pdfs and graphics etc). And especially the use of any backend databases is very easy. Hence, I can quickly create a prototype but of course I can always switch in case I would see a need for it. But here again, I agree that I’m looking through my RAD development glasses at Xojo, and my view will not be compatible with others views.
That’s how real Software world work.
What is really free,… and if it is free , who will earn money to make a living……
BR Rainer
Yep, our open source Corona App is a good example in Germany, isn’t it? Free, more or less useless (or way below would could have been done). Still it absorbed a 2 digit million EUR budget and I’m not aware of many who “reviewed” the open source code but the decision makers are convinced it is the best one in the world ;-). And at least the iOS Frontend could have been developed in Xojo iOS, nothing fancy on those screens .