Used to be if you didnt sign in for a day or two you missed so much
now you can check once a week and not miss hardly anything
As for consulting leads I think theres been 6 since Jan 2025 - yes 6 in over a year
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That is not good news for anyone in the Xojo sphere. Quality leads were always an issue too.
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It is at the end of the timeline for professional projects. Long time ago. People which have existing apps may ask for somebody. But many are also going elsewhere to get their apps rewritten in more common languages. It is not such a problem to do this.
The biggest problem XoJo has: no attractively for new users. Cause it is made for users from the VisualBasic World. It targets directly on them. And yes, for somebody coming from VB it is a strong looking tool. For somebody coming from C++ for example it generates the question why and for what? XoJo has no real attractive features which are coming up with a better functionality than other languages like Flutter/Dart, C#, C++, Java, Pythonā¦.All of them are more flexible. And at this point not to speak about languages like Kotlin.
It is sad: this is ended up and nobody wants to buy a nearly dead horse.
Remember REALBasic was originally Mac only, though Iām sure Andrew Barry took inspiration from VBā¦ There were no easy RAD tools for the Mac way back when.
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How many years ago is that? Do you really believe anybody knows that still today? It was before decades. And their marketing was long time: VB programmers can work with it
More than a few here! 
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Okay, this is really a point 
literally about 30 years ago
I first ran into Cross Basic in about 1996 or so
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The post above shares Alyssa Foleyās perspective on 30 years of REALbasic/Xojo.
While Xojo is not my personal preferenceāI tend to favor PureBasicāitās hard to ignore its longevity. Over the years, it has outlived several well-known technologies such as Visual FoxPro and earlier versions of Visual Basic.
One point that stands out to me is the RAD approach. While it enables rapid development, it can also encourage building applications without much upfront planning, which may not suit every developer or project.
That said, Iām not making predictions about its future. The fact that Xojo has adapted and remained relevant for so long is, in itself, noteworthy.
It is long time on the market but it never reached the amount of users like Visual Basic or TurboPascal had. That is a difference whiule XoJo was and is a niche product. But it is to respect that it is still on the market. No question.
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I would say that Xojoās longevity is a result (or at least partially) from a very dedicated group of users that provided free support, free QA testing, necessary/nice to have add-ons, and lobbied for many useful/required features and bug fixes during those 30 years. Many of those users are now gone either by aging out, or leaving the community for better development tools (of which there are many).
We can go item by item but the choices a developer has in the Xojo community are incredibly limited whether that be database management, reporting, controls, libraries in comparison to other development tools. It doesnāt have a very robust 3rd party market or open-source community. Sure, there are exceptions but they are minuscule when compared to many other development tools.
Personally I feel that without Christian, Bjorn, maybe Graffiti Suite, and a few others that Iām sure Iām forgetting, Xojo would be dead already. Well, maybe not ādeadā in the truest sense but maybe more irrelevant than it is now.
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Yes, 3rd party stuffs are one problem, the IDE is also one problem. The people are in love with their drag and drop designer which they could have at least with java Swing or JavaFX (I doubt that there is no designer for some DotNet solutions). The problems with Database-connectors and many other features and the possible workload of the XoJo applications is another problem.
For the users the most impressive part is their drag and drop UI designer and the simple handling of the UI. No problems with instantiation of windows, no problem with threads, XoJo takes care of. That is for some people an argument. For some may not. For me at least it is no argument cause: you loose all control.
Hence XoJo has nearly no flexibility and the used libraries are fixated in their library collection there is no chance to change. Their stuffs are delivered with the App in resource folder and you have no chance to change at all as normal user. And the OS API access is let me say poor.
But for a beginner it is comfortable and to learn programming it is a really interesting tool I guess. And it is really interesting for everybody which has experience with VisualBasic from microsoft cause with that knowledge using XoJo is no problem.
Microsoft ended with this programming paradigm and changed to VisualBasic.net which is - I have never used it and I have no experience with it - for the Visual Basic users not a choice they would wanna work with. Why ever, I have no Idea.
So it was at least in the times when all users of the VB world needed a new tool or wanted to enter with their skills new platforms (what is the reason why Mr. CEO was choosing the way of implementing new platforms) . And this concept worked. In the beginning as a tool for macOS only while there was nothing like VB on Mac. Later as a tool for all desktop OS platforms while there was no VB for macOS and Windows what made it to a general key for VB programmers. And so on.
This period is ended up. First while there is no new VB user coming to XoJo anymore cause only old VB users are using VB. There is no customer of Microsoft as a new born one coming after VB was deprecated and out of sales. And instead choosing VB.NET people chooses in most cases C# which was more powerful. That story ended before two decades. Means: the people using VB6 still for Windows development are using u tool written in 1998 and maintained until 2008. After that day there was nothing new coming to VB6.
Every programmer with VB6 skills which wants to enter further platforms like macOS, Linux, WEB or iOS and much later also Android can use XoJo out of the box and it works for him out of the box. That made it interesting. But people which worked before nearly three decades with VB6 are becoming old. Many of them are retiring or doing it in a short time. The amount of new users is extremely low. And there is an alternative to XoJo also running on all platforms. With B4x there is a VB alternative running itās IDE on Windows and delivers Desktop for Windows, Linux and macOS, mobile for iOS and Android and even MCU programming for Atmega, ESP32 and more with B4r and it is (except the iOS solution) for free.
Looking on both communities I can say: B4x is much more active than XoJo community. XoJo WAS really an active community. But that was long time ago. Today we have a few users writing on their Forum. Not many. As B4x is using Java as programming platform there is much more 3rd party stuff available for its ecosystem.
And that is still one of the keys. XoJo has an ecosystem which is small. And it even became smaller. If the few vendors wouldnāt be there: XoJo would have no real relevance anymore. But also with this vendors there is no need to use XoJo. And there are no people with VisualBasic skills anymore. This combination makes it really complex to get new users. And the old ones: some going away to other toolchains. Some are at the end of their lifetime. That is the truths behind it.
Its Geoffās
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TBH I dont ever recall Geoff saying he didnt care about building a community around RB/Xojo (which some people really pushed him to do since look what it did for VB)
But, his actions, certainly seemed to show his disdain for such a thing
Several times it was suggested to do things like VB did
VB successfully did this & shipped the product with demo / limited versions of several plugins to expose people to them & 3rd party additions
And now some are enormous businesses in their own right - Crystal Reports anyone ?
But those things never gained any mind share with the powers that be at Xojo and so you have what you see today
A very small company in a small and apparently shrinking niche
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Xojo would be better off embracing the future instead of clinging to the past.
They missed that opportunity years ago, and the aging CEO seems more concerned with protecting his pension than moving the company forward. Rest in Peaceā¦
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