Review: 7 excellent mobile app builders

Over the last six months, I’ve been examining and testing a variety of mobile app builders and mobile back ends. In some cases, the app builders and back ends were part of a single product. In other cases, the app builders or back ends stood on their own.

In this roundup, I’ll summarize seven products that are at least partially a mobile app builder. Some have IDEs that run locally on your computer; others give you a Web IDE that lives in the cloud. Some are aimed at enterprise development, others at individual developers or even students.

As we’ll see, they can have almost any level of complexity for the developer, ranging from drag-and-drop simple like EachScape, NSB/AppStudio, and Salesforce1, to providing an API for the developer to code against in Xcode or Eclipse, which is the way Appcelerator supports native SDK developers.

They can target mobile Web, mobile hybrid, or native apps for Android, iOS, and occasionally some of the less popular mobile device platforms, such as Windows Phone. They may integrate with one or more mobile security products. For instance, AnyPresence makes it easy to secure your app with Apperian.

They may be tied to an MBaaS (mobile back end as a service) platform or not. They may or may not be able to consume and modify data from systems of record. If they can, they may require the developer to write a RESTful interface, or they may take care of the connection themselves.

They might reduce the work required to support offline mobile operation with offline/online data synchronization and conflict resolution to checking a few boxes on a form, like Alpha Anywhere, or hand you a box of parts and an assembly diagram with pictures and instructions in Swedish — sorry, that’s Ikea, but you know what I mean. In between those extremes, they may supply a framework that does part of the work, but leave out the rest and expect you to fill it in with code and forms.

If they support HTML5 apps, they might or might not support your favorite JavaScript framework. If they target native or hybrid apps, they might have their own online app building services, integrate with PhoneGap Build, or rely on you to build apps with the native SDKs on your development box.

They may be priced anywhere from $99 per developer to “low six figures per company per year.” In most cases, I’ve found the prices to be appropriate and the value to be good for the right audience, but a student can’t benefit from an enterprise-level app builder and MBaaS any more than an enterprise developer could get by with a simple app builder with no integration capabilities.

In short, the scope and complexity of these seven products vary widely, and no single product is ideal for everyone. With that in mind, I’ll try to emphasize what sort of developers and designers are most likely to enjoy and be productive with each app builder. Different strokes …

Alpha Anywhere

Alpha Anywhere is a database-oriented rapid development tool that allows developers and designers to create Web and hybrid mobile apps that work offline. It allows less-experienced developers to create sophisticated apps with a combination of configurable components, visual design tools, code-generation “genies,” and a small amount of coding in Xbasic or JavaScript.

The Alpha Anywhere IDE runs on Windows. The tool targets iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and other mobile and desktop clients with HTML5-compliant Web browsers.

Alpha Five was a Web and desktop application development tool with an application and Web server, a PDF report generator, and strong support for dozens of SQL and desktop databases. Alpha Five in turn grew out of Alpha Four, which was an easy-to-use dBase clone.

Alpha Anywhere is an extension of Alpha Five that brings mobile Web and hybrid mobile app development to Alpha Five’s bag of tricks, including the recent addition of support for offline operation, offline-online data synchronization, and intelligent data conflict resolution. The folks at Alpha Software have thought through most of the cases a mobile device might encounter in the field — trying to consume, modify, and generate server data with unreliable network connectivity — and have reduced the choices you need to make as a developer to a matter of checking a few boxes.

On the downside, the Alpha IDE and application server currently run only on Windows; Alpha’s application server is proprietary; Alpha lacks a scalable cloud service; and Alpha lacks native mobile client support. Mitigating factors for the lack of native iOS and Android code generation are integration with PhoneGap, and the fact that the Alpha Anywhere mobile components and controls have been crafted to look and feel native.

Overall, I rate Alpha Anywhere very good as a Web, mobile Web, and mobile hybrid development system. The IDE is powerful and easy to use, although it has so many features that it’s easy to forget where to find the one you need. The capabilities and integrations are very good.

Alpha has its own JavaScript client framework, which includes support for jQuery, but not for some newer frameworks such as Angular and Backbone. On the other hand, Alpha’s templating language has a distinctly Angular feel to it, and you can’t really complain about the framework when the system generates almost all of the code for you.

Companies that want to create mobile apps that use SQL and REST data sources will benefit from Alpha Anywhere, especially if ease of development and short time to market are important factors. Alpha’s strong support for offline mobile operation, offline-online data synchronization, and intelligent data conflict resolution helps it to stand out in a world where those important issues are too often ignored.

AnyPresence

Both online mobile app builder and back-end service, AnyPresence combines broad client support, useful code generation, and a rich set of options for data storage and enterprise integration. While I originally rated AnyPresence using the criteria of the MBaaS category (with a 9.1 and an Editor’s Choice), it is also an excellent app builder.

AnyPresence builds apps, back-end services, and API gateways. It has an online designer that not only generates back-end and mobile app code, but also customized mobile API code. All of the generated code can be downloaded, edited, and run on compatible platforms. To cite one of AnyPresence’s favorite customer examples, MasterCard has used AnyPresence to enable partners to easily build mobile apps against MasterCard’s Open API services.

AnyPresence generates App UIs (or starter kits, if you wish) for jQuery, Android (XML layout), and iOS (Storyboard), and it generates App SDKs for Java, Android, HTML5, Windows Phone, Xamarin, and iOS. It generates back-end servers for Ruby on Rails and Node.js. The AnyPresence environment can generate deployments to Heroku (usually for a back end), to Amazon S3 (usually for HTML5 apps), and to native iOS and Android apps with or without Apperian security.

The AnyPresence design environment lives online and runs in most browsers. In addition to the interface designer, it has a dashboard; a settings screen; screens to create and monitor environments, deployments, and builds; screens to generate and deploy apps, back ends, and SDKs; screens to add and manage data sources and data objects; screens for authorization, roles, and authentication strategy; screens for stock and custom extensions; and a customizable set of themes.

I found the selection of data sources to be good and the implementation of the provided MongoDB data store to be on par with that of other MBaaS systems. What sets AnyPresence apart is the way the data model integrates throughout the design environment and into all the generated code. The only other app builder that comes close is Alpha Anywhere, which uses SQL databases for its back-end data store.

AnyPresence lacks its own monitoring service, but integrates with third-party services such as Airbrake and New Relic. AnyPresence pricing is high compared to many of its competitors, but offers more value for enterprises that need to integrate their existing systems with mobile applications. It is especially valuable for enterprises that wish to expose their APIs to partners who can in turn use them in their own mobile applications.

Appcelerator

Appcelerator Titanium has been a player in the mobile development space for several years, with a JavaScript-based development environment that compiles to native code for iOS, Android, and other targets. With the release of Appcelerator Studio 3.3 and Appcelerator Platform 2.0 in July 2014, the company added an MBaaS with about 25 APIs, Node.js support, and online analytics. Also, Appcelerator has published interfaces to its MBaaS that developers can add to apps built with native SDKs, although it hasn’t yet supported native SDKs in its own Studio IDE.

As with AnyPresence, I originally rated Appcelerator as an MBaaS. Of course, it is also a very good app builder with an excellent IDE.

Appcelerator has multiple frameworks on the client side and multiple API types for the cloud. At the base level on the client, Appcelerator offers the Titanium SDK, which provides an interface between JavaScript and native services. At a higher level, Appcelerator offers the Alloy Framework, which is based on the model-view-controller architecture and contains built-in support for Backbone.js and Underscore.js. When you create a new client app from Studio, you’ll typically generate one that uses Alloy.

On the cloud side, you can reach the Appcelerator Cloud Services using a REST API, via bindings to the Titanium SDK, via Node.ACS, and via native SDKs. The REST API will always work, though it’s the least convenient option. You’ll mostly want to use REST calls to reach new services that don’t yet have bindings to the Titanium SDK.

Appcelerator can call REST and even SOAP services using HTTPClient and its built-in parsing routines. If you’ve set up a REST wrapper for a database query, you can get the JSON data into your app fairly easily. That wrapper might be implemented on Node.js or on another server, as in the case of a Web service extension to the database server.

A more serious MBaaS would already have tested, integrated modules set up to easily map the major databases to a form consumable by its apps, certainly for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. I view leaving this as an exercise for the developer as a cop-out, even though writing RESTful database wrappers isn’t rocket science, especially on Node.js.

Appcelerator says it has a few enterprise connectors it sells on the MBaaS layer, such as for SAP and Salesforce.com. And one of the advantages of Node is the supply of community-developed modules for many other sources such as MySQL, SQL Server (which works on a Windows server with Node.js), PostgreSQL, and many NoSQL databases.

Similarly, Appcelerator can use a local SQLite database on a device, work with pair storage, cache in-memory, and detect when the device is online. However, it has no complete framework in place for handling intermittently connected apps, especially not conflict resolution. According to the company, most of its customers use Alloy models to handle some of this.

Appery.io

Appery.io is a rather capable cloud-based mobile Web and hybrid mobile development platform with online visual design and programming tools and integrated back-end services. You can think of it as a cross between an app builder and an MBaaS.

The Appery.io app builder generates HTML5, jQuery Mobile, AngularJS, Bootstrap, and Apache Cordova code, and the Appery.io build server generates iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and HTML5 apps. The Appery.io MBaaS provides hosting, a MongoDB database, push notifications, JavaScript server code, and a secure proxy. It allows HTML hosting to its own cloud, to Heroku, and (manually) to third-party hosting providers.

The Appery.io app builder has tabs for the app settings, your model and storage, your pages as you create them, dialogs, templates, themes, CSS, whatever services you define, your JavaScript, and any custom components you define. The builder uses a WYSIWYG design metaphor with a palette of more than 25 controls, including those for external services such as Google Maps and Vimeo, and displays a property sheet for each item. You can switch from design view to source code view to see your generated HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any device-specific code: Java for Android, Objective-C for iOS, and XAML backed by C# for Windows Phone.

Appery.io can talk to essentially any REST APIs, whether or not the company has prebuilt the interface. Tying a prebuilt REST interface to a service is a matter of a few minutes; building the REST interface from scratch takes a little longer and requires knowing a little more, but it’s not a big job.

You can test your HTML5 app as you go, both in your desktop browser and in your phone and tablet browsers; everything that doesn’t depend on Cordova will work. To test your Cordova code (for example, to use native device capabilities or get push messages), you build your app, download it to your device, and run it there. For convenience, Appery.io will display QR codes for your HTML5 app and your binaries so that you can download them directly to your device. For even more convenience, you can install the Appery.io Native Test App shell on your device and point that at your code.

In general, I found the Appery.io app builder easy to learn and use. Appery.io has done a good job of designing its IDE so that mobile developers will not usually be surprised by what they get.

It’s nice that Appery.io has its own cloud-based builder and build service. Coupled with the browser-based IDE, this means that mobile developers don’t need to have multiple computers or multiple VMs to create native apps, and they don’t have to maintain multiple native SDKs and IDEs.

EachScape

EachScape accomplishes the hat trick of generating iOS, Android, and Web apps from an online drag-and-drop designer. In addition, EachScape provides mobile back-end services for apps you build with its platform, Web preview for all apps, and an online build service.

The architecture that allows EachScape to build iOS, Android, and HTML5 apps from a drag-and-drop editor (the Cloud Studio) depends on blocks and modules, as well as layouts and actions. Under the hood, EachScape has implemented a set of classes in Objective-C for iOS, in Java for Android, and in CoffeeScript for Web apps that correspond to ads, buttons, containers, controls, data connectors, data input, HTML, images, maps, media, navigation, placeholders, RESTful remote queries, social networks, and text. Advanced developers can build new blocks and modules for EachScape to extend its capabilities, using its SDKs.

The EachScape back-end services include Cloud Collections (explained below), data connectors, analytics, mobile ads, social media access, push notifications, location services, and billing. EachScape does not currently offer back-end services outside of platform subscriptions.

The EachScape Cloud Studio has a Microsoft Visual Basic/Borland Delphi kind of development paradigm. Drag a block onto a page of the app, position it visually, and configure its properties. View a Web preview, play with it, and iterate. Use a cloud data collection or another data source to populate the app with data.

When you’re ready to try the app on a device or in a simulator, build the app online and check the targets you’d like from various ranges of Android versions, iOS 7 and 8, and HTML5. Once any target has been built on the EachScape cloud (which can take a few minutes, especially the first time you build an app for a given target) you can download the app for testing in a device or simulator. A QR code on the build history screen makes the download to a device painless.

The Cloud Collections feature of EachScape is a little like the MongoDB implementation in most MBaaS platforms and a little like the CMS in WordPress. The EachScape data connector is essentially limited to RESTful XML, RSS, and JSON data sources. EachScape currently offers no tools of its own to create RESTful wrappers around systems of record. According to the company, those will be coming in Q2 2015.

NSB/AppStudio

NSB/AppStudio targets both mobile Web and mobile hybrid apps. The AppStudio IDE was written in JavaScript, HTML5, and WebKit, and it runs on Windows and Mac OS X. The combination of ease of learning, ease of use, royalty-free distribution, and low prices helps AppStudio bring mobile Web and hybrid development to the masses, in the spirit of Visual Basic and the early Borland visual programming products.

You can drag and drop your way to runnable mobile applications built from forms and controls, and write code either in NS Basic — essentially VBScript with a few extensions — or in JavaScript. At app publication or runtime, whether for local development or server deployment, any Basic script is transcompiled to JavaScript. You can display the JavaScript for any displayed form from the IDE.

In the AppStudio IDE we have a form designer, toolbox, project explorer, property sheet, and help windows, all familiar from Visual Basic and its heirs and imitators. The IDE doesn’t do its own debugging, however — that is handled by the browser or, in the case of PhoneGap apps, through weinre, a remote debugger for Web pages. 

Right-clicking on a control brings up a context-sensitive action menu that lets you create event handlers, add components, and adjust the layout. The selection of components is satisfying and includes almost 60 controls, ranging from simple labels to complex widgets and interfaces to financial services and social media.

AppStudio allows you to build both mobile Web apps and mobile hybrid apps; the latter is facilitated by integration with PhoneGap. AppStudio comes with more than 100 samples, ranging from “hello, world” to demonstrations of using all the included controls, about 30 Web services, and a dozen third-party JavaScript libraries.

The performance of AppStudio NSBasic mobile Web and hybrid apps is surprisingly good and basically identical to the performance of JavaScript from other mobile Web app builders.

If you are only beginning to play with mobile development and don’t have a programming background, NSB/AppStudio is a good place to start. Be aware, however, that it has limited functionality compared to full-featured mobile IDEs and MBaaS platforms, and specifically lacks native mobile app support and enterprise integrations.

Salesforce1

Over the last few years, Salesforce.com, the prominent SaaS platform for sales force automation and other business applications, has been building out its mobile strategy at multiple levels of developer difficulty, ranging from easy with minimal control to hard with complete control. In the simplest option, the Salesforce1 toolkit includes a Web-based drag-and-drop designer suitable for a business analyst. It allows the analyst to customize the app, control security and access, and streamline the process of working with records from a mobile device.

While using the Salesforce1 designer seems simple, it provides a lot of value. When you use it, you provision a custom schema in a cloud database as a service, with strong security, role-based permissions, and automatically exposed REST API endpoints. You get a mobile app that can access anything in it. Should you need to connect to Salesforce via XML Web services, Salesforce can generate the appropriate WSDL for your custom schema.

At the next level of complexity, a Web developer who knows some HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript can build pages for Salesforce1 in Visual Force with Mobile Packs or using Lightning components. At the highest level of complexity, a mobile developer can build native or hybrid applications against Salesforce data for iOS and Android with the Salesforce Mobile SDKs. Meanwhile, any of these can utilize the mobile back-end services provided by the Salesforce1 Platform.

Salesforce provides free Salesforce1 native mobile shell apps for iOS and Android, which users can download from the appropriate store and use for viewing Salesforce1 Web content. These hybrid apps provide advantages over Web apps, such as retaining state after a context switch and supporting secure offline read access once the data has been loaded. A Salesforce1 Windows Phone app has been announced, albeit without a scheduled release date.

Just as Salesforce has mobile development methods for all levels of developer, it also has back-end development methods for all levels of developer. For novices and business analysts, the obvious choice is point-and-click declarative Force.com logic. For developers familiar with Java, Apex code will be relatively easy to learn. For those who know the SQL Select statement, SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) will prove to be an easy way to query Salesforce objects. For full-text searches, there’s SOSL (Salesforce Object Search Language), which allows you to search Salesforce text, email, and phone fields for multiple objects simultaneously.

Finally, for even more flexibility, you can connect Salesforce to Heroku and do server programming in open source languages.

Mobile development to match

Alpha Anywhere is a good choice for consultants and corporate developers who need to build mobile Web and hybrid apps for corporate use, especially apps that depend on data in centralized SQL databases. Alpha’s support for offline mobile operation, offline/online data synchronization, and conflict resolution is exceptionally good.

AnyPresence is a good choice for enterprise developers who want to create mobile APIs that their ecosystem of departments and partners can use to access their services. As its Editor’s Choice and high score reflect, AnyPresence is our all-around favorite in this category, but its hefty annual price tag favors larger businesses with high mobile usage.

Appcelerator Titanium is a good match for JavaScript developers who want to generate native apps without writing Java, Objective-C, or Swift. It’s especially suited to people who like Backbone-like JavaScript frameworks and Node.js.

Appery.io is a good match for corporate designers and developers who want to build their mobile Web and hybrid apps in the cloud, but don’t require native apps. It’s also good for easily connecting to REST services.

EachScape is a good fit for consultants as well as corporate designers and developers who want to build their native iOS, native Android, and mobile Web apps in the cloud. It integrates well with REST services.

NSB/AppStudio is a good choice for students and consultants who like the Basic language and the Visual Basic drag-and-drop paradigm and who want to build mobile Web and hybrid apps. Its greatest strengths are its simplicity and ease of use.

And Salesforce1 is a good choice for businesses that already use Salesforce and want to extend access to their Salesforce applications and databases to mobile devices. It offers several development options suitable for different levels of skill, ranging from online drag-and-drop configuration for business analysts to native SDK support for experienced mobile developers. If you already use Salesforce, it’s free. If you don’t already use Salesforce, however, it would be an expensive option if all you need are mobile apps.