Save yourself a TON of time! Use this 8 Point Checklist to easily discern which Development Platforms are duds and which ones are growing FAST.
(Spoiler Alert: Backendless (https://backendless.com/) is BEST!)
1- First step find your way to their website. Look for a PRICING link? If you don’t see it at the top, it may be at the very bottom of the page, where all the other site links are listed. Sometimes you may have to step through their menu bar to find the pricing page. If you see, REQUEST A DEMO, instead of pricing, then you KNOW the price is going to be outrageous, and only affordable to well funded development teams.
2- If they do have their pricing tiers listed, the next most important thing to ask yourself is this. Does this price include UNLIMITED USERS or will you have to PAY PER USER. When I see pay-per-user, this tells me this technology is just too slow for wide scale adoption. ALSO, way too expense for anything I might want to market.
3- This is important. Click on their Blog link. Check how often do they post updates? Are they talking about new added capabilities? The WORSE thing to see are blog posts with no dates. This tells me they are no longer actively posting OR developing and most likely given up.
4- Next is the all important FORUM. Look for a Forum. If the don’t have a forum, this means the technology is just too buggy. If it wasn’t buggy, a forum would allow the existing user base, to support new users and save a lot of support costs. But if the platform is buggy, they can certainly keep this from the public, by not having a PUBLIC FORUM.
5- Then you should look and see what kind of TRAFFIC is happening on this forum? You want to at least a dozens of posts a day. Not two or three a week. Look to see how long it takes before questions are answered. Ideally they should ALL be answered promptly. Even better, are more experienced users chiming in and helping the newbies?
6- Try this. If all else looks good, go ahead and join the forum. Post some questions, even if you haven’t even taken the time to get hands on for evaluation of the platform quite yet. See how well you are treated. The way inexperienced NEWBIES ARE TREATED will tell you a lot about how easy or difficult if will be getting up to speed on this new platform.
7- Finally, one last thing to check AND maybe the most important. They BETTER have a GALLERY of apps. These are all the production apps that users have completed that are now available in Apple’s or Google’s App Store. How many are there? There should be LOTS!! If not this tells me, for some reason developers are giving up before completing their projects. Not good! Also ask yourself, are these production apps simplistic OR are are serious and admirable projects you might want to emulate?
8- Oh! Last but not least. This is only important once you’re actually developing your app. When you make some changes and press Preview, you want to see your app working… QUICK! No longer than 10 seconds. Otherwise, you’re probably using outdated technology.