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Although it creates applications that run on Windows, REALbasic is a Macintosh-only application. For a pure Windows developer, let alone a Unix developer, it’s useless.

Even for a Macintosh developer looking to deliver to PCs, the lack of a Windows version of REALbasic will be a significant drawback. Debugging for the PC (and make no mistake — there will be some debugging specifically for the PC¹¹ ) has to be done remotely, in a code-compile-run-test cycle that is the exact thing people use rapid application development environments to avoid. In fact, it’s worse, since each time the compiled application file must be transferred to the PC for testing, and there are no debugging tools available for the built application on Windows.

REALbasic cannot create applications for Linux or any other Unix.

REALbasic can only have one project open at a time. This can hurt productivity by making it difficult to transfer resources (code, design elements) from one project to another.

Despite being a high-level development tool, REALbasic has much in common with lower-level tools like C++. Its object-oriented nature and strict variable and object typing can be confusing even to experienced developers. For example, in order to set a property of an object, it can be necessary to cast the reference to the object to the object’s own type.¹² Other times the developer is forced to jump through syntactic hoops to get a reference to an object. Finally, REALbasic doesn’t really eliminate any of the steps from the traditional code-compile-run-test development cycle of lower-level languages; it just speeds them up.¹³

REALbasic can only have one code editor window open (for each of a project’s windows) at one time. As a result, there is no way to see the code simultaneously for two controls on the same window. Even the individual routines are viewable only one at a time, making it impossible to view two routines in a single control simultaneously.

REAL Software’s practice of releasing new betas for REALbasic almost weekly¹⁴ , while a strength in one sense, is also a significant weakness. No version of REALbasic is ever fully debugged, because development marches on, adding new, sometimes buggy features. Developers often simply use the latest released beta to develop, or keep track of the most stable betas and use those, sometimes even in preference to official released versions. In addition, developers sometimes find themselves in the position of having to purchase paid upgrades in order to get bug fixes to features that remained broken in previous releases.