What is Kony Mobility Platform ? Their Products ?

Kony Platform

At Enterprise Mobility Blog, we cover all the major Mobile Application Platforms in the space. We have been hearing a lot about Kony and our readers have requested us to write about Kony platform. We will try to focus more on Kony platform and hope to write more articles on the same in the future.  In this article we will introduce Kony and their offerings.

Kony, is an Orlando based mobility company, backed by a total funding of $58.4 Million, with its flagship mobility platform branded as KonyOne platform is positioned as a visionary in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development platforms(MADP) in 2012. Gartner is yet to release its Magic Quadrant report for 2013, everyone in the MADAP space are eagerly watching.  Kony has offices all across the globe and their primary product development center is in Hyderabad, India.

Note : This article is slightly dated, please take this with grain of salt as we are working on updating the article.

What are Kony’s Product Offerings ?

 KonyOne Platform : Kony’s flagship product is a Mobile Application development platform called KonyOne Platform. It comprises of two components, KonyOne Studio and KonyOne Server. KonyeOne Studio is the IDE used to build mobile/ multichannel apps, it is based on eclipse. You can leverage the cross-platform JavaScript API that Kony provides in the IDE to build cross channel mobile apps.  It also provides channel specific API to leverage device/ OS specific properties, including options to integrate third party libraries using a capability they call as Foreign Function Interface (FFI).   You can integreate with any of the typical back-end systems like web services, databases, ERP systems, etc. KonyOne server is the application server / middleware that applications built on Kony platform interact with. It runs on top of traditional J2EE Application server and provides a host of features like offline sync capabilities, security, device detection for mobile browser optimized content, SMS, Push notifications, etc.  Kony has a position in Gartner Magic quardrant for this offering.

Kony Apps :  Kony offers a set of pre-built apps built on Kony , that customers can use to get to market faster. They are customizable based on user needs and built based on certain industry verticals use cases. They can connect to any backend as well with configurability options and code free options.

Kony Enterprise Mobility management (EMM) :  Kony EMM is a mobility solution that organizations can use to provision, update and monitor mobile devices, apps, including data and content from one console.  Kony used to offer Kony Mobile Application Management ( MAM) previously only to manage applications. They are now offering a full suite under EMM. Kony did not make it through the 2013 MDM Gartner Magic Quadrant , but was evaluated according to Gartner report for MDM. We will have to wait and see where Kony heads in this space because they are offering a full suite under EMM.

Kony also has about 200 customers globally with some of the big names.  Currently, Kony does not give out their software to public developers to try out. You need to be a partner or customer to use their IDE or software.

 

What do you think about Kony ? Have you been using Kony ?  What is your experience about Kony products  ?

 

15 thoughts on “What is Kony Mobility Platform ? Their Products ?”

  1. At a bird view (10,000 ft height) this platform looks pretty and attractive. All high level management who done coding long back or never done at all easily trapped with the sales pitch of this product. Ground reality is entirely different.

    1) KonyOne IDE: Always it is referred as Eclipse based. Yes it is built on top of Eclipse. So does KonyOne IDE runs on all platforms which generally expects. No, KonyOne IDE runs only on Windows which is a big surprise. So what does it mean. If I want to use KonyOne IDE on Mac where I can build any kind of mobile applications for all platforms is not possible. Have to use Windows VM to run KoneOne IDE on Mac. Is it not awkward?

    2) Foreign Function Interface: This is the magic mantra of KonyOne platform. For very small things like checking Data connectivity is available or not, needs to be developed in FFI using native languages.

    3) Support: This is another interesting pain area. No from outer world like stackoverflow except from Kony Developer Forum which is restricted to people who attended their training. Even in that forum, pointing links to unclear documentation or please use FFI. Plenty of good questions are unanswered.

    4) Capabilities: KonyOne platform provides very basic capabilities when compared to Titanium. Surprisingly there is no functionality available to display route between two points on Google Map v2 in KonyOne platform which is a natural requirement when we are dealing with maps. They say it is in roadmap for v6 which was mentioned to be released in April but not yet out.

    5) Documentation & Example: There are couple of documentations available. All documents run couple of 100 pages. But most of the content is repetitive and unclear. All examples are converted from their old Lua and never get clarity by referring them.

    6) Size of the app: A very small hello world application consists of single form and a label with hello world results into 2.3M size.

    There are plenty of points which can be pointed out when compared this $$$ software with open source solid products.

    I always wonder why customers wants to buy these kind of products when they are having very rock solid platforms like Titanium.

    Reply
    • As of June 2014, sadly most of these points still remain TRUE, only thing that changed is that the IDE now works in Mac & Linux as well.

      The other points still remain a pain in the neck to work with. For example, there’s no support for basic things like accessing a user’s photo gallery (camera roll) to select a photo. You also can’t save stuff to the local filesystem, if your app needs to download a file (like a picture) and save it for later use.. the only way is to convert the bytes to a base64 string and save it the local store (which is key/value pair).

      Support is ridiculous, as the poster mentioned.. there isn’t a single blog or specialized website in the net with tutorials or questions and answers for common problems. The only form of support is their official forum where the answer will almost always be “use FFI”. If I need to use FFI for everything I might as well develop the app natively!!

      Kony also supports custom or third-party widgets with pre-made functionality that you can import into your project, pretty much like Titanium’s mobile modules. Only problem is that there are none available for download on the internet!!! Even on the official Kony page/forums/github they don’t offer any widgets!

      I don’t know how this company survives because judging by the lack of information about it on the internet it seems nobody in the world uses it. Appcelerator/Titanium is soooooo much better!

      Reply
  2. One of the best features of this product is its SAP integration. No middleware add-in approach – SkyMobile is really top notch. Similar to other MEAP it has some challenges. But Kony really stand out in SAP space

    Reply
  3. Great article! Everyone please explain disadvantages of kony mobile platform and The Pros and Cons of Mobile Cross-Platform Application Design

    Reply
  4. How to get rid of Kony platform and move my app to another platform, and would the code from Kony be reusable? What would be rewrite percentage.

    Reply
  5. The mobility is most important now days for all enterprises and we need to adopt it as soon as possible for our own benefits. Thanks

    Reply
  6. Though it says that report was published in October 2016, has lot of data from 2013. Kony released Visualizer range of products long back. Their HQ is no longer in Orlando. FFI is used minimally. I suppose, there is a need for a re-look.

    Reply
    • Umang,
      What has changed ? Would love to hear what has changed, we can update the article to reflect the new features and changes.

      Reply

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