I did that (bought first license 25 years ago) … I kept expecting it to get better and believed in its potential… but eventually became disillusioned.
It did help me do things that helped me get more noticed and valued at my jobs…But that was years ago now.
My last paid license was 5 years ago but before that I was current most of the time.
It’s really tragically stupid when a CEO fails to understand what a gift it is to have a user base that believes in and roots for your product and is willing to patiently wait for progress that s/he ensures through their actions, that this progress never comes.
But let’s speak truths: none of the great tools of the old times was surviving really. Visual Basic: dead. TurboBasic, PowerBasic, TurboPascal: dead. Looking how many users they had and lost. Why? In many cases while the time goes by. Before there was XoJo there was no tool for iOS, web and Desktop applications like this. Today…there are much better ways. The Desktop solution alone? I doubt that it would have survived. Many of the users are looking for more platforms. They made the decision to become X-Platform. This they tried to realize with one hand full of developers. This could only work when having a bad quality and a low functionality. This result was to expect. We can look on it from all sides: if it would be Desktop only it would be dead already and the result of the cross platform way we know already.
The most of the developers are from the old VisualBasic world. High grade of compatibility. And so XoJo users are generated. Following the facts with upcoming C# cross platform XoJo tried to compete. And lost.
May be that there would be a better product with only one platform and may be that there are better ways of providing a product. With five devs nobody will be able to fix this thousands of Bugs and nobody will be able to provide the dream of a bug free product. So at the end features are held baken. Cause implementing a feature costs much time. And this time isn’t there. We can speak about this facts but at the end we always will come back to: not with 5 devs.
it might be fair to say there was no simpler tool for iOS development
While Xcode existed its not exactly “beginner friendly”
Xojo was kind of “VB for iOS” and in that regard had some uniqueness
Xcode has more and more complex functionality than Xojo. But you don’t need to master all of it at once. The real issue is Xojo’s inconsistency and incomplete implementation of core features, like string handling. And I would rather invest time in mastering Xcode than in coding around Xojo’s bugs and omissions.
oh dont get me wrong
Xojo wasnt perfect
Neither was VB
But VB was wildly successful despite its shortcomings
Xojo could have been as well
They tried
And now they have tons of targets & platforms to support with what appears to be a shrinking paid user base (thats just a guess)
And a fractured not x-platform framework - you cant take much code from a desktop project & reuse it on Android or web so “write once deploy many” really isnt a thing there like it is with some other tool chains that have come around since
And that rests largely with the “vision” - or lack thereof - of the CEO
as of this writing he still hasn’t checked in
says a lot
I cannot comprehend ignoring customers like that. Incomprehensible.
From what we can see from TOF, some users of these added platforms were already using Xojo. So, they are not new customers IMHO.
They pay a bit more thus.
unless to him it just doesnt matter any more
Pretty sure he’s comfortable regardless of what happens at Xojo
exactly why I dont think adding all those platforms/targets had added significantly to the user base
I know that one person who was a shareholder at one time, and so was privy to information I wasnt, said their revenue peaked at about 1.5 million a year and has been on a steady decline since then.
And, from the way it was related, that was long before all the additions of new targets etc.
I have no reason to dispute this.
That would lead me to suspect that all those target additions hasn’t added many new customers rather it maybe retained existing customers who might have left earlier
But it is simply like I said. The small team can’t maintain all the stuff without many accidents. This can’t reach a good status. They can’t fight against all of the Bugs. Which is normal. They are five. And to everybody which is telling me that a bigger team isn’t better: there is no company getting this kind of job done with five people. Not XoJo, not MS with C#, not Oracle with java or CodenameOne with their product. It is not possible to fight with five people against thousands of Bugs.
There is no framework they can rely of which is consistently implemented. And even that isn’t possible. They could go this way. If they would do their Kotlin setup in a better way. Cause with Multiplatform approaches of Kotlin they could provide simply the native GUI AND a really working framework base.
But they have decided not to go that way. Nothing against that. It is and was their decision. But like all the stuffs they do. half baken stuffs. And a too big job for a small team.
Wow, I logged in last a few years ago, only to see the XOJO woes are still a thing 
How is everybody doing?
The last price increase was alienating, a pointless burning of bridges, or simply a strange decision to not care about keeping the user base, their users have several options costing basically $0/year for what in Xojo now costs $1000. That decision was like Xojo wanting a divorce. 
I see a mini Borland with a mini Delphi causing a mini implosion to itself. A mini history comeback. I don’t see people thinking about renewing with the current trade off, and burning the sub $300 entry level will damage Xojo very much.
And to add to the pile how about “this API 2 thing is going to cause confusion" ?
AI’s cant sort out which is which either
How shall AI do that when it is nothing you can do in code like: import XoJo_API_2 for API2?
People have trouble sorting it out especially since its been a moving target for several years since it was introduced
So I’m not surprised that AI’s cant figure it out either
Was just saying that the confusion was entirely predicted by those in the beta program at the time
But ignored
That it will be confiusing was known. And they even had by self this knowledge. But they decided renaming events is a good Idea. The result is that it is not really working proper in AI. Happy Coding.
There, fixed that for you.