If you’ve been following along with BubbleCon news, you know that I’ll be speaking in a live fireside chat on Wednesday, October 25 at 10:45 AM ET moderated by Alexis Barker, our director of partnerships. This event will also be streamed virtually, so if you haven’t registered yet for BubbleCon, you can do so here.
At this fireside chat, I’m very excited to tell you more about my Bubble journey, our product strategy, and our team’s roadmap. I could go on and on about our product, but since we have limited time, I want to make sure the Q&A portion hits on the questions that you all care most about. I’d love to field questions from everyone here, as you’re some of our most active users on the platform!
What questions do you have for me? Please respond to this forum post and let me know. Use the “like” button to upvote questions, so we can do our best to address the most popular ones.
I would love to hear about Bubble’s plans for integrating AI in the design and development side of things. Softr.io just launched their AI app generator and @ZubairLK has uploaded a great first-impression video and the results look very promising.
I’m pretty careful jumping on hype trains when new buzzwords arrive, but I think most would agree that AI is different. If Bubble lags behind in the AI game, I’m concerned that another platform might take the dominant position.
AI has been mentioned in the past as an important direction to take, but what I’ve seen has been vague. Would love to hear more!
(and to reiterate, I mean AI that designs and develops Bubble apps for you, not integrations/plugins)
I look forward to meeting everyone at the conference
An integral part of app development is not just the building itself but fixing things when stuff doesn’t work as expected, which pretty much happens every few minutes - its all part of the game.
One thing we can all agree on is that debugging in Bubble leaves a lot to be desired. Improving the debugging process obviously involves making improvements to the debugger itself, but one thing we have not really heard about is testing automation within the bubble editor itself. Are there plans to allow users to configure the testing of bubble apps within bubble itself so that we can engage in rapid testing of our apps?
Modula components are incredibly important in that they provide users a base foundation upon which they can create powerful apps and not have to hand design every little part of their app. Bubble’s component library has not really changed since it was launched. On top of that, third parties are building component libraries that can be added with browser extensions on top of Bubble, which leads to a confusing and fragmented landscape.
What does Bubble feel is the best approach towards increasing the quantity and quality of components that can be added to user apps? Will AI replace the need for third party component libraries? Will third party component library creators leverage AI within Bubble so that Bubble itself hosts those libraries? Is this part of the template marketplace, or is it something completely different?
Please for the love of God, improve the debugging process.
Running my app in safe mode, without plugins, offers me a night and day difference. Trying to debug by removing plugins one by one is unreliable, time-consuming, and probably stupid as hell when you’re trying to debug a complex app.
Being able to see the power players on your app is integral to building better apps.
Also, while I’m wish-listing, are there plans for Bubble to use AI to tell users how to convert existing workflows and processes, into more robust and efficient systems?
Will Bubble be offering more capability for elements within repeating groups? It’s virtually impossible for an element within a repeating group, that sits within a reusable element, to be able to directly communicate with the base page.
What is your thoughts on, and how do you prioritize improving on the many “quality of developer life” type issues that the Bubble editor has and, at least to me, sound very easy to solve.
Like:
Sensible default values for very common elements, such as groups, texts and buttons.
short commands, tabbing and other keyboard based optimizations.
random visual annoyances (not being able to lock property editor on workflows, unclear/“hidden” notes, hard to visually match label/inputs on data detail views, etc etc)
These and similar are not sexy subjects, but they literally affect hundreds of thousands of developers many many times every day, so, how are they prioritized?
There’s a strong trend on the No / Low Code movement towards decoupled arthitecture. In order to ensure that not only we will be able to create MVPs, but also scale our applications and create applications to large customers and companies, it’s very important to be able to connect to powerful external backends.
Bubble’s infrastructure is not really built for those kinds of integrations with external backends, as there are no official plugins, and the API Connector has few client-side features (extremely important to avoid high WU usage and ensure we show data without delay).
So, what are Bubble’s plans towards decoupled arthitecture? Does Bubble plan to launch official plugins to connect to Supabase, Xano, Firebase?
What are Bubble’s plans towards the API Connector? Does Bubble plan to launch more client-side features on the API Connector?
There is a feature that is highly requested by clients of software houses, large companies, and even governments: access to source-code.
I understand that today it is practically impossible for Bubble to allow the export of source code due to the “monolith” infrastructure in which we create frontend and backend in a unified way.
However, if Bubble plans to create features to enable decoupled architecture, this would also allow users to use Bubble as a Frontend tool connected to external backends and therefore it would be much easier to export the source code.
Does Bubble plan on allowing source code export in the future?
I’d be curious to know about the future of the component library as well.
(FWIW, if Bubble made the component library into a marketplace and allowed users to contribute and monetize, then I’d be all over it like flies on …uh …bananas …or whatever. I mean, I’ve already built “components” that do what some plug-ins do.)
Bubble Speed: The speed of Bubble, especially in loading pages and showing content, seems slow. For example, when using a “Schedule a API workflow on list”, it’s recommended to have a 5 second delay, which means 100 items will take 500 seconds to process – this is quite long. Even on the agency plan, previewing a page with just a button takes a long time to load. Other services, like Cloudflare, seem to load data much faster.
Plugin Editor Issues: The condition of the plugin editor feels outdated and similar to using Notepad in 2023. Why we can’t we return the custom object data in server side action (we end up using the workaround). Also, when you submit a plugin, there is no confirmation email from the Bubble team and no option to offer an annual plan to users from within the plugin editor. Testing plugins with Bubble provides a slow and frustrating experience. Sometimes the plugin element UI doesn’t load, and sometimes elements can’t be found in the left section.
Lack of Support and Visibility: There is no support from Bubble in marketing or increasing the visibility of plugins. It’s impossible to search for a plugin by its description, and embedding videos into plugin descriptions is not allowed. Additionally, the default setting for user reviews is a 3-star rating, leading to inadvertently lower ratings even when users enjoy the plugin. Plugin description section become the image like text after installing the plugin, user can’t copy the link given into description. So what’s the use of the description section.
We need stable product. For the past month, the responsive editor has been unreliable, with various bugs appearing. It seems that when one new feature is added, 10 existing features experience issues.
Btw massive thanks for updating the Bubble documentation, I am loving it.
Is there any plan to publish your product roadmap?
There seems to be talk about mobile features being announced soon. Can you assure the community you are putting engineering resources on mobile features with a clear timeframe to make your core web product stable/reliable, on priority basis?
Is there a reasonable timeframe to expect the looping feature that was announced a while back?
Is there a reasonable timeframe to expect the ‘create a list of things’ feature that was talked about by Josh in the October community update?
Based on the AI capability teases, are there any considerations to introduce AI capabilities for plugin building? I’m not a plugin developer myself but would like to give it a go. Would be great to have an AI copilot to give newbie plugin developers a headstart.
I wish so badly that we can choose basic settings like these. I’m tired of my texts and groups being set to 200px by default. Let the people choose please Bubble!
I’d like to know how is Bubble positioned to continue to be operational. Is there a time clock on reaching profitability or has that marker already been reached? Is there a need for another round of funding to stay operational long term and if so, what is the ‘runway’ Bubble has in a numerical value represented in months (so does Bubble currently have 24 months, 12 months, 6 months of runway before they need to raise another round).
I remember when I read about Bubble raising the $100M and I told my wife, I can now ‘go all in’ on Bubble. Now, with the recent need to increase prices to keep investors happy, the challenges Bubble has faced with keeping the platform reliable and a public announcement that this particular challenge will cause a slowdown in rolling out new features, which I’d assume could impact Bubble’s pace of growth and new user acquisition, I’m curious if Bubble is well positioned financially so that I can rest easy with a realistic expectation that Bubble will not fizzle out and pop.
I think of myself and others like me as investors in Bubble (people who were early adopters, those that created a living from Bubble and continue to help foster the development of the community, furthering the goals of Bubble as a corporate entity) who, although Bubble being a private company, should have some insight into Bubble’s financial health.
Hey Boston good question,I would like to let you know that despite media fear-mongering U. S economy is doing well and keeps growing with no recession in sight.Increasing interest rates and current U.S fiscal policy adds to government spending and allows room for growth.Assuming bubble’s revenue comes mainly from U.S, bubble will be fine on that front for a while.
My question was not so much related to the health of the US economy, but more direct towards the financial health of Bubble. Even though Bubble’s revenue comes mainly from the US, Bubble salary expense and other operational expenses are priced in USD as well I’d assume, so I’m not really asking the question out of concern for the health of the US economy.
Bubble raised the $100M sometime ago now, and have moved fast to expand their staff, particularly in engineering and other high salary leadership roles. Other areas of focus for the funds raised was to put toward education and lowering the learning curve, both of which likely did not take too much from their funding, but they also started to focus more on marketing, which obviously consumes dollars, and in a pretty competitive NoCode landscape of 2023, might not have the lowest cost of client acquisition. Bubble has over the years struggled with increasing the percentage of ‘users’ who are on a paid subscription (the percentage 18 months ago was shockingly low). So with every dollar spent on getting a new user, that new user acquisition doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue, and in a vast majority of the time, it becomes a drain on resources (think free plan, build and use at no cost to the user but a cost to the provider).
There was also a price increase about 6 months ago, that may or may not have turned out positive for Bubble. It would be interesting to know how many long time users migrated away from Bubble, and how many paying customers left after rebuilding on another platform, and how those figures may have decreased revenues, but at the same time, the increase in price may have been a net positive, and I’d assume part of the answer to my question would touch base on that topic.
Does Bubble have any plans to offer regional pricing. I see over and over that Bubble states that it wants to support companies of all size but the barrier to entry for those from poorer nations prohibits that initial starting point so is there any localization efforts to attract these markets or is the focus purely on US businesses? I am saying this as I know other no-code tools are offering this.
I mean, I’ve already built “components” that do what some plug-ins do.)