GO!AppZone Studio

GO!AppZone studio is an IDE to develop mobile apps. It uses HTML5 and native technologies allowing for fast development and deployment of apps for mobile phones.

FEATURES

GO!AppZone studio is an IDE or SDK for the rapid deployment and development of mobile apps. It is cross platform and nowadays you can develop for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry. It is proprietary software owned by Globo but as of now, it is not clear what their pricing scheme is. In their website they claim it is free and all their platforms are free, however if you are using it for some time you will find out you have to pay, and worst of all they are not telling how much you have to pay when you download the product for the first time.

Our problems with this SDK started when we first went to their main page. They have a non-verified security certificate. So, when we tried to access to it our browser told us to get out of the website immediately. We weren’t scared about a bad security certificate but if you plan to look serious to customers, it is not a good idea to present them with a security warning as a welcome. So, we proceed and tried to download their free products.

Well, here we had more problems. We couldn’t download the products right away and we were asked to answer a lot of questions for them to send us the product to review. It was actually a way to make us register for their website before we got the product; this didn’t impress us either. We proceeded and after filling out more than 10 fields and registering with them we waited for a long time until we got approved and we could download GO!AppZone studio.

With GO!AppZone studio you will be able to develop casual apps for mobile phones by using an integrated IDE and a drag and drop environment. While their environment is very clear and very well organized, there are not so many options to choose from and in the end we will have to code unless we are creating a very simple app. Furthermore, it is not clear how to deploy your apps later in the marketplaces and there are no options to do so in the platform as of now.

The drag and drop system works pretty well and it is clear and intuitive. Building a simple app can be done in minutes but the problems start when we want to make something more complex like a videogame. There are no tools for creating the graphics for example and there is no graphic engine or anything similar. Even though we tried, there is no way we can do something graphically decent with it.

Sound options are scarce as well. Actually there are only a few options and you won’t be able to make anything really cool unless you start coding, and here the problems continue. Yes, we can use JavaScript, CSS or HTML5 to do so but we had almost no help. The way they are managing the apps is not really clear at first glance so we decided to take a look at the community and ask them what it's all about and why we have to upload everything to their container instead of publishing it in the market or whatever we want to do with our apps.

So, we went to the official forums to take a look with our registered account. Great, the last post was 4 months old. Seems there was not much activity over there. There were a few complaining posts and actually no help for us. We then tried to look around the web for help. Nothing. Nobody seems to know this studio and nobody seems to care about it. Actually, from the looks of their security certificates and the forums being abandoned we would say not even the developers care about the product at all.

A bit frustrated we kept tinkering with the SDK to see if we could do something useful with it but no. It is no use. We could not get to make a hello world program working without using raw JavaScript and we could do this with any open source and free environment anyways. If we wanted to publish anything with it, we didn’t find any options to do so and the testing manager seemed to freeze every once in a while. They claim in their website you don’t need to test your program for every device and that seems true because it doesn’t work for any. At least not without using raw code that we could compile in JavaScript.

PROS AND CONS

PROS

• Their website is orange color. We love oranges.

CONS

• Their website has a security warning, our browser advised us against going to their website.
• It is not clear how to download their products. The price is not clear either.
• The studio is buggy.
• There are not many options.
• You can’t actually make any graphics with it.
• It is not intuitive at all.
• There is no useful help in the IDE.
• There is no community. Their forums are abandoned.
• Nobody seems to have experience using it.

CONCLUSION

We are not sure if this was a failed product that is still up for downloading or the developers don’t care about it anymore or what, but the thing is the product seems to be completely neglected. Their website is not updated, it has security warnings and it is not clear where to find the download section. We could not download the product right away and we had to register first and wait until they approved to go to the downloads page to discover a buggy product with almost no help. And if you can’t figure out how is it working, don’t go to the forums because they are empty. Nobody seems to be using it anymore and we have no clue if somebody actually used it at one point. We advise against trying to use this product for any project. There are plenty of options in the market so there's no need to waste your time with GO!AppZone studio.