You can write your own plugins in the small business edition AFAIK
Enterprise Small Business allows you to write your own plugins that you can build into your own apps. You can include them into all your Corona based iOS and Android apps with no restrictions.
The plugins you make with “Small Business edition” can be shared with (sold to) other Enterprise users if your wish. (Small Business or Unlimited. There’s no marketplace, so you’ll need your own way to receive/manage payment if you decide to sell to others)
If you want users to have access to your plugins from Corona Simulator, you need to have self-hosted plugins provided by Enterprise Unlimited.
@ingermar,
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t remember ever seeing any discussion about “hosted plugins” on these forums and I was confused about what how they work.
Hi Corona,
Would you be able to detail to me what exactly makes corona enterprise only work on mac?
So far from what I’ve seen you have some shell scripts (.sh) that would be mac only, but those can most likely be run on windows with cygwin. Obviously the paths inside them would have to be altered for windows, such as where the CoronaEnterprise files are located and stuff, but that is easy to do.
The point of being Enterprise is to be able to publish Corona apps on both Android and iOS with added flexibility.
iOS needs Xcode which only runs on Mac. Paying for an Enterprise version for Windows that can only publish to Android doesn’t make much business sense to me.
It is true you can only use xcode on a Mac, but there are other reasons for getting enterprise then doing native development for iOS :)
For example, there is a nice enterprise only plugin that I only want to use on the android version of my app, and currently I would have to use a Mac to code it.
My main development computer is a desktop PC which is what I’m most comfortable coding on. I code almost everything on my PC - if I needed to code native iOS then yes I would have to do it on my mac laptop. Other than that I only switch to my little MAC laptop to build a release version of my app and deploy it to an apple device, not for active coding development. I would say most of my time spent coding would be doable on my PC, and only a very small percentage would have to be done on a mac. I don’t have a nice mac to code on, and I honestly don’t really like the mac OS and hate coding on it anyway.
I’ve been looking through the innards of the enterprise build process, and it looks like it would be pretty straight forward to develop the scripts for PC compilation.
For what it’s worth, I would use the PC version and I would be very happy 
Corona Enterprise can only be used on Macs today.
Definitely can see that in your case, it might be more convenient to use Enterprise on PCs for Android development. However, for the majority of use cases, it’s optimal to allow you to use Corona Enterprise on a single desktop computer so you can deploy to both iOS and Android, and right now, that means Macs.
Your argument is currently valid but will be debatable when Windows Phone support is added to Corona Labs. That’ll level the playing field for Windows users 
Windows 8 phone is implemented with Corona Cards, not in the traditional SDK nor in Enterprise.
Rob
Hopefully Windows phone 8 will be added directly into enterprise in the future. As well as Windows 8 store, HTML5, etc. I think the use case for PC users of corona enterprise will only become more weighty as these technologies are added.
I’ve been using my enterprise trial on my Mac and I can already feel my blood pressure rising and the additional stress on my heart lol Mac OS just kills me :o
We are considering a move to enterprise, but our entire infrastructure is PC based and this is where we feel comfortable. Moving to all Macs will be a huge cost for small team and as spacewolf said, a significant health hazard. I personally hate every minute I need to spend with my current mac just copying and building for the device. I can’t imagine working there for hours.
I’m just wondering, can’t we setup a windows based env, build and test there for android and once the project is ready use the mac env just to build for iOS devices as we do today with pro? this will greatly reduce the time we need to spend on mac.
Another question, since we only need enterprise to create new plug-ins. Assuming we create the plug-in on enterprise, can’t we simply ‘export’ it to be used in the pro version? It will allow most of the team time to continue using the current workflow using pro. After all, how can corona and other third-parties offer plug-ins to pro?
Appreciate your advise.
In response to “exporting” plugins for other Pro users within your team:
It’s possible with something called “self hosted plugins”, but that requires the more expensive “Enterprise Unlimited”
Thanks ingemar,
That’s 2,400$ per year! can’t we upload the plug-in to corona server for private use or something?
Can you tell us please what’s your experience moving to enterprise? especially what overhead you experience over using the pro?
I really afraid a move will take half of our productivity away.
[…] can’t we upload the plug-in to corona server for private use or something? […]
Nope.
Can you tell us please what’s your experience moving to enterprise?
Firstly I’m an avid Mac user, so I have no issues with using Mac 100%. If you don’t like using Mac you might find working with it difficult. (I *was* a 100% Windows user up to 4 years ago when I “converted” to Mac)
If you need to share plugins with your team, I see that as a major issue with only “Small Business edition”. You could contact CoronaLabs and tell them about your situation (number of developers etc) and they might be able to help in some way…
I enjoy not having to rely on online-builds. All my builds are local, and I can use whichever version of Xcode / Android Developer Tools I want. Enterprise gives you much more freedom. As soon as a new SDK is released, you can start using it if you wish.
Enterprise does require you to know more about the native build-pipeline though. If you’re not familiar with basic native Android / iOS development you *will* struggle a bit. But that’s Enterprise for you since gone is the hand-holding that Corona normally provides.
Enterprise enforces a certain directory structure for things to work properly, but that’s not a big deal as there are templates provided.
Enterprise and Pro projects are not easily mixed. It’s either Enterprise or Pro. This is mainly due to the differences between how Corona plugins are implemented. For Enterprise you manually add the plugin as static libs / jar files to your project. For Pro you do as usual and specify them in your build.settings.
All-in-all I like Enterprise and I will not go back to Pro-only as long as I use Corona. Once you get past the initial barrier (that always exists when implementing a new tool), there’s no more overhead than using Pro only. How long is the barrier? That depends on your experience with each platform. I was comfortable with Xcode so iOS was nearly instantaneous. Native Android on the other hand was new to me, so it took some time for me to understand how the whole build-process worked.
Building plugins requires you to understand the Lua<->C stack. Without understanding that you’re going to be banging your head against the wall. The sample apps help somewhat, but you need extra input. I highly recommend getting the official “Programming in Lua” book by Roberto Ierusalimschy. This is what will take the most time to understand, but will also provide you with the benefits of Enterprise as you have access to the full SDK on each platform.
ingemar,
Thanks again for your input.
This helps making the right decision for us.
So, Enterprise Small Business ($79 per month plan) doesn’t allow you to write your own plugins and build them into your app?
You can write your own plugins in the small business edition AFAIK
Enterprise Small Business allows you to write your own plugins that you can build into your own apps. You can include them into all your Corona based iOS and Android apps with no restrictions.
The plugins you make with “Small Business edition” can be shared with (sold to) other Enterprise users if your wish. (Small Business or Unlimited. There’s no marketplace, so you’ll need your own way to receive/manage payment if you decide to sell to others)
If you want users to have access to your plugins from Corona Simulator, you need to have self-hosted plugins provided by Enterprise Unlimited.
@ingermar,
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t remember ever seeing any discussion about “hosted plugins” on these forums and I was confused about what how they work.
I have Enterprise version. but it is not working well.
I have already made plugins for ios and android and hosted on my server.
just .jar file and .a file.
I have make iphones.tgz and android.tgz.
but it is not working well.
Is there any more detail help?