With its footprint heavy in the application space for over 20 years now, Mountain View, Calif.-based Appcelerator provides next-generation mobile applications that are open source and can run on multiple devices including Android, iPhone, mobile Web devices, Windows, and BlackBerry.
With the application space continuing to grow at a rapid pace with now around 40,000 plus to a million and a half developers that have downloaded the company’s product thus far, it is currently touted as the most popular app downloaded on the App store behind iOS.
Jonathan Rende, vice president of products at Appcelerator, told MobilityTechzone, “People want native apps because of the experience, but it’s tough to do that with the expensive costs associated with building native apps on all different providers. Hence, we allow people to build native apps without scarifying the user experience that can be used on all different smartphones.”
Currently, there has been a big shift from original mobile apps that were once consumer-based to building applications for companies and the applications provider’s target audience now consists of both independent developers who build these solutions just for themselves as well as those who sell them to enterprises companies that want to completely transform how they do things.
Rende stated, “One of our customers is Zipcar who builds mobile applications that can go into the system and find the car done via the application that is build upon Titanium, our flagship product first unveiled in 2007.”
He added that the biggest trend right now in the space is not just industry developers increasing in popularity, but the way in which enterprises want to build apps.
According to Rende, “People are screaming for the need to connect to systems and have apps on the front end. With the trend of BYOD, it is blurring the expectations of the users from the consumer world into enterprises and into companies. Yet, they want the same experience so it is crucial to first build the app for a rich user experience. People don’t want their Angry Birds game to look like Asteroids.”
As far as customers feedback on Appcelerator’s portfolio thus far, it has been overall extremely positive due to three things including a huge decrease in cost, a reduction in risk level, and a major decrease in time where users who leverage this product can have up to 90 percent application reuse in one operating system to another.
“In situations where customers used to have 100 developers creating mobile IP apps, now they can have one team essentially the same size that builds it, which significantly reduces resources and time,” he commented.
A main challenge within the industry today includes the fact that people who are relatively new to the mobile vertical can sometimes be overwhelmed due to the fact that a lot of noise and information causes people to panic. However, once they realize that the mobility introduced via the cloud brings apps to every person out there, they quickly see they now just have build the application once and then have the ability to deploy it on every single device at the same time.
Looked ahead into next year, Rende concluded, “It will definitely be an exciting ride. As the market grows, we grow our next-generation mobile platform. We are continuing to think of how can we make mobile apps by enhancing the user experience while making them cheaper and getting them to market much faster.”
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Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli 
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