It seems to me that everything has become bad since the moment when corona became free. I think you should make a fundraising company on kickstarter. And restart corona making it paid as before. It is very sad to see that gamemaker studio is developing, and our beloved corona sdk is dying 
Thank you very much, it was with you that we developed our best game Draw Rider
Anton
This is pretty much what we have planned with crowdfunding. Corona is not dying. Corona Labs is. We tried several business models with several ownerships.
I feel good about this one.
Hi Vlad,
I’m happy to hear you feel good about this one. I was one of the loudest voices complaining when Corona became free, because I’d rather pay and have more security than use free software that could one day disappear.
Needless to say, I will happily pay a recurring monthly or yearly fee if and when the crowdfunding is set up! I’m assuming this info will go up on the blog, once we’re there, so I’ll be looking out for that.
I’m not abandoning Corona but would like to consider options. There has been mention of Flutter here, but I’m wondering if anyone has experience / feedback with “Thorium Builder”. It’s mainly for creating PWAs, which seem to be gaining popularity.
Hi Rob, Vlad, and everyone else!
I had been away from the forums a couple of weeks when I saw a random Facebook post yesterday saying that Corona is going out of business. My heart almost stopped. I’m getting very close to a release for my game Ice Trap on iOS, and I saw all my hard work going to waste. The day I had feared for a while had finally come, just a lot earlier than I had wished for.
Now that I’ve got some more information after reading this thread I feel a little better. Still scary news, but as we all know, it’s been coming for quite some time. It actually feels like this is a good chance for a fresh start, as the direction Corona has been going in the last couple of years has been unclear to say the least. Now we know what’s happening, and hopefully we can all help out in different ways to keep Corona alive and also make it grow!
For now, I’m definitely sticking to my Corona guns and I hope everyone else does too. I love working in Corona. The thought of moving over to another platform really puts me off, and there’s never a guarantee that the same thing won’t happen to whichever platform I would choose instead. Being a hardcore programmer making 2D games, I think Corona is a perfect fit. It has almost everything I need, and if something’s missing I have the chance to implement it by myself without too much of a hassle. As long as I can continue to compile my games for iOS and Android I see no reason to move anywhere.
The biggest issue for me at the moment is (of course) if Apple decides to drop OpenGL support in iOS 14. Let’s just hope that’s not going to happen, which would then give us at least another year to develop our apps and games for iOS before Metal has to be supported in Corona. Is there any chance to affect Apple regarding OpenGL and Metal? I mean, it has to be in their best interest too to keep as many apps and games in the App Store as possible, right? Is Corona the only platform still using OpenGL or are there other platforms facing the same problems?
When it comes to financing in the future, I’m DEFINITELY prepared to pay in order to use Corona. I think it’s almost ridiculous to expect that a platform of Corona’s caliber should be free even for commercial use. Every business has got to make money somehow to keep going! Whether it will be a monthly/yearly fee, a license to build for the app stores, crowdfunding, or any other business model doesn’t really matter to me. I’ll be happy to chip in with whatever reasonable amount of money I can to keep the platform and community alive! If help is needed to fix bugs or implement new features in Corona I would be happy to help out with that too as long as I have a little time to spare.
I also want to say a big thank you to everyone who has been involved in making Corona what it is today! Especially the Corona team of course, but also everyone else who’s been developing apps, plugins, libraries, being active on the forums, finding bugs, letting other people know about Corona and so on. You’re great!
I’m truly broken-hearted.
Corona was the first platform I ever considered using for mobile development and Carlos was of great personal help. Seeing the SDK move from something I could just about afford, to free, to plugin supported was awesome.
I tried learning Objective-C and failed badly. I tried Swift but don’t have the time. I fear, and fully expect, this to be the end of my mobile development - certainly in the games area. Nothing has come close to the ease of access and simplicity of Corona.
I want to thank everyone who has helped me solve problems over the years. I tried to give back to the community as much as I could, but have not been able to be so active recently. Maybe if developers like me could have been move consistent there would have been a future, or maybe the business model was wrong. We may never know.
I would also like to thank everyone here who helped me understand the physics engine when I was writing the one and only game I ever developed myself. It was such hard work but so rewarding. I am heartbroken not only because CoronaLabs is at an end, but because my game Tiltopolishas been removed from the iOS app store due to iOS version incompatibility and I now believe that I will not have the time (or ability?) to get to grips with the open source version of Corona to get it back on the store (or even if that is a permanent solution.) This is painful because it was the only app or game I ever wrote with my brother, Phil, who passed away 7 years ago. Tiltopoliswas our shared legacy in our favourite realm and now, with him, it is gone.
Thank you to everyone who helped us and thank you to CoronaLabs and all who made Corona a success while it was.
Matt
@horacebury, the open source version probably won’t mean that things will change for you at all. You can download the latest daily build now and resubmit your game to the App Store. Once the offline builds come around (and things go fully open source) then the process should still be relatively similar, i.e. you download a new build of Corona, but this time you’ll just place any plugins that you have to some local folder.
Based on everything that people have said, it doesn’t really seem like things will change all that much for those who only use the simulator to build their games. In fact, I expect things to keep on getting better going forward.
@spyric I fully intend to do that ASAP. Should have done it sooner!
We have to put our faith in the community spirit and the passion of Corona developer-users to keep CoronaSDK alive. I, along with many I see posting on this thread, really need to pull together and get a Patreon started. I do hope @rob and others can be involved.
If everyone promising their support can keep together and pitch in as one then there may well be a bright future ahead 
@Markus, thank you for the transition2 library. I currently use several of your transitions and have been inspired by many more. Like your Ice Trap, I have a project nearing completion so I’m happy to see the community getting together and working to make Corona a success.
@horacebury, Like @Spyric said, you should be able to use open source Corona as effectively as you used it before. Also, thanks for you math libraries. They’ve come in handy several times!
@Markus, thank you for the transition2 library. I currently use several of your transitions and have been inspired by many more. Like your Ice Trap, I have a project nearing completion so I’m happy to see the community getting together and working to make Corona a success.
You’re welcome! It’s great to hear that I’m not the only one using it. :lol:
@Marcus _ I also use your transition2 library _ it is well done and most helpful. Thanks for sharing that.
There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to compile with a recent version of Corona and get your app approved?
If you need a hand with anything just reach out to me (or another other dev here really) and I’m sure we’ll help you get your app back online. Don’t let it (or your history) die…
Some of these posts surprise me a bit. I thought we were very clear that Corona Labs (the company) was ending and that Corona (the product) would go on and we are hoping there won’t be much of a noticeable difference.
I guess we didn’t succeed with that messaging.
Rob
Some of these posts surprise me a bit. I thought we were very clear that Corona Labs (the company) was ending and that Corona (the product) would go on and we are hoping there won’t be much of a noticeable difference.
I guess we didn’t succeed with that messaging.
Rob
Rob, you are right about this. To me, it’s still not obvious what will actually happen or how things will affect us. I think you have to be much clearer to avoid speculations and doomsday scenarios.
I don’t like to be picking on your wordings, but I believe that using sentences like “we are hoping there won’t be much of a noticeable difference” is one reason when it comes to causing speculations and wild guesses since they don’t leave any guarantees. It could just as well mean that we end up with very much noticeable differences because hoping wasn’t good enough.
I also believe that the information about this could and should have been communicated better. Speaking for myself, it felt quite strange that I had to actively scan the forums to find this thread after seeing the initial “out of business” message in a random Facebook post. I checked my Facebook, Twitter, and the Corona Labs homepage first without finding anything more. Then went to the forums, didn’t see any posts that caught my eye there either. Of course it didn’t take long at all to find this thread, but just the fact that this information was “hidden” under the rather ordinary title “From The Blog: Corona Labs annual update” felt awkward. To me, these news are HUGE and definitely deserve more direct attention. Maybe you could have just sent an email to all registered Corona members to grab everyones attention and clarify things right from the start? I think that could have prevented a lot of the now ongoing speculations.
That said, keep up the good work. I really appreciate what you’re doing, and I’m strongly hoping for the best possible future of Corona!
By the way, @Rob, you said the forums were going to be migrated somewhere and/or changed. Will our profile statistics like how many points we have and how many posts we’ve made and post history remain or will some or all be lost?
Point 3 here can only really be answered by the current CoronaLabs staff and obviously I wouldn’t want any NDA’s to be broken, but positive answers would certainly help build confidence in the future.
That’s why I’m not checking the forum that much the last days.
Hopefully when we move to another structure these posts will stop appearing :).
Our goal at a minimum is to save the posts. Profile stats etc. Maybe not as much. If we can just move the database off of the expensive infrastructure to something more cost effective, then there shouldn’t be anything in the way of changes, other than possibly eventually breaking the ties to developer.coronalabs.com. If we end up changing software, which there is some desire to do, we will port as much as is reasonable.
Rob
3 is really a tough question to answer because there are so many scenarios ranging from getting people working on the engine out of passion to keep things successful. Hiring out one-time contracts for certain tasks. Hiring out on-going contracts. There are a lot of possibilities.
Vlad’s time, given the things we know we have to do, is pretty allocated for the 6-9 months. If you want things done more faster, then either pitch in skills, or more donations to help fund project contracts.
Rob