Not an official one that I know of, but I think there are third party attempts?
I think so tooā¦ (in fact, not attemps, but [ANN] products in the Xojo Forum)
What is killing Xojo? API 2? Nope.
Competition + Price increased beyond the intrinsic value.
The world runs on top of Kotlin, Java, C#, Javascript, Dart/Flutter, Python, Rust, C ā¦ all $0.00, all supported by large companies.
People could pay some cash to risk on Xojo, like $99 (tops) for each platform (high like that because it had a community), and $0.00 for Console (thatās how the market sees the value for console compilers). And Xojo increased to $166.50 per platform ($999.00 / 6, Xojo Pro). Too high. The last price increase drove lots of people away, thatās how I feel the situation.
Why not both?
When I was kicking Xojoās tires, API2 was already a thing, so that it was a breaking change wasnāt a direct pratical issue for me personally ā except that it was noted as a cavalier attitude towards backward compatibility and existing users that would eventually come for me, too.
Slow death by a thousand cuts for sure
API 2, then small adjustments to it along the way which made pretty much all existing reference material, examples, etc useless in one fell swoop (which AIās have taken a decent amount of time to more or less sort out)
Web 2 which means every āupgradeā of a web 1 app is a full rewrite (see Convert Web 1.0 Project to Web 2.0? - Web - Xojo Programming Forum)
Price increases
Slowing bug fixes
And Iām sure Iāve forgotten others
From my perspective the requests for consultants slowed dramatically when API 2 rolled out and has declined every year to the point now that 2026 has had 2
2025 had about 15 or 16 through the entire year
And 2024 had a few more (20 or so if I recall)
It used to be that many per quarter
Yep. Geoff also pushed peeps away before AI made open platforms manageable.
He sailed at full power into the iceberg.
ja, the Titanic too was once considered as unsinkableā¦ until she hit the icebergā¦
Alienating skilled community members and ex-staff members, leaning into AI slop over skill.
What could possibly go wrong ?
Partially, I think. There was plenty of consulting requests where I was the ONLY developer to contact them. So the pool of Xojo consultants has never been big. Heck, the Xojo user base has never been huge.
My consulting drop off came about the same time as decent mobile options came available and at the same time other tools started doing cross-platform desktop apps. So if you had an idea for an app you might have come across Xojo and then started looking around for Xojo developers you came up with just a few options and none in your area. Start looking for Java, or .NET, or Xamarin (sp?) you could find people in your area.
I agree that itās not just ONE thing. Itās many things all in a relatively short period of time. Some of it is market changes, some of it is technology changes, some of it is hubris and management of the product. Now, add in AI and why would I consider Xojo?
For fun I created an internal tool using Wails (Go and Svelte). I had the Go part down but never done a front end like that from scratch. Within 4 hours I had a working app. I donāt think I could have done it that fast with Xojo even in my heyday having all the components I knew I needed. The world is changing fast for software development.
The forum activity was decreasing to less than half of what it was before the price increase, and the extinction of the solo platforms plans in July/2025. I donāt see many faces there anymore. Looks like it obliterated half of everything (with some help of the AI)
Last year I tried a bit of Flutter, worked with Python projects, and now decided to unrust my Kotlin that was very much āHello worldā for the current standards (Iām still working on it).
You might have cause & effect reversed
Consulting leads had been slowly dropping off for several years prior to API 2
And yes loss of many devs likely exacerbated the issue once leads started to drop off
But devs donāt leave before leads drop off as long as it pays the bills etc
Maybe we donāt know āthe causeā because it is a mix starting with the eternal unstable beta of the past, and reaching the critical point of feedback loop, snowball effect. Bugs ā Less devs ā Less Code ā Less leads ā Bugs ā Less devs ā Less Code ā Price increase ā Even fewer devs ā Less Code ā Even fewer leads ā ā¦
Wellā¦ I never cared about leads. I just want a tool to create and maintain products, stable products, by the best price compared to competitorsā equivalent options.