Bubble has it flaws but fixes them.. unlike Flutterflow

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I know a lot of people start their ‘Programming;’ life with a free Bubble account and spend a few months or years learning it. I’ve built a few paying Bubble apps in my time but the direction Bubble was heading in and the amount of ‘forgotten’ promise lead me a away. The vendor lock in is real and a major part of Bubble’s investor return plan so for me I wanted to limit my exposure to another round of price hikes… oh and those bloody magical WU units :joy:

I took a wander over to Flutterflow and ended up getting quite into it and developing and publishing some Android/IOS apps… downloading the code and generally thinking that a reliable product was all I needed and I found my tool!

Well it turns out that a reliable product is the bare minimum and sometimes Bubble or Flutterflow slip up; we all do at times! The difference between Bubble and Flutterflow is that

  • Bubble will fix ‘as best possible’ within a decentish timeframe, and it will be all hands on deck if it’s a big bug!
  • Bubble will communicate at every stage and the community ‘chip in’ to help get things solved.
  • Bubble doesn’t want to give clients a bad experience overall and will address mayor cock-ups.

So why the post?

Well I have invested a lot of time into learning Dart/Flutter, but Flutterflow has taken a wild turn in favour of their Vibe Slop Pumper - Dreamshite and has abandoned their main product.

Simple things like using ‘Test Mode’ has been down for weeks. Typing into the code editor, broken. Merging branches… yeah that’s never worked. The AI agent feature… not even half baked. Critical security issues giving bad actors access to your libraries… thats present!

They tell you to ‘stick a report on top of the other 500+ bugs’ or 'use another browser/pc/dimension/mindset/washing detergent ect and that’s it. Nothing else, just “give us your money and shut up” silence!

They’ve recently removed the ability to use the Debug panel on the free account.. so good luck learning anything! They have stripped away so much non-cost related functionality, all to force you to upgrade to the now £150.00 a month package! (I was worried about paying an extra couple of bucks to Bubble.. sad I know!)

I’ve seen Josh and crew come out of the woodwork with hats in hand before. Abel and Alex are so far up the investors ‘brown tunnel’ you’d never hear them even if they did try and show some consideration for their clients.

Please don’t take my word for it, head over to the community page and bask in the glory of your superior community, your active members, your accountability, your reliability, the impact of your voice and just remember - It ain’t always greener!

Thanks to all you active Bubblers… you make the difference!

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That’s a refreshing viewpoint. The grass is not aways greener. One thing about Bubble is they do care.

Many of the folks who moan about bubble - well it’s because they care.

The ones who hate on Bubble - well goodbye and good-luck. Hope your new platform you think is soooo much better serves you well.

Thanks for this post.

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“Many of the folks who moan about bubble - well it’s because they care.” - that was me until I walked away. I guess I believed that they’d never really change or improve but that was a mistake on my part.

Flutterflow is crumbling to dust whilst Bubble seems to have grown and the community seems to be staying active. Some faces have changed but it’s nice to see posts being answered, even the ‘how to add Hello World’ ones!

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Still hoping for a @keith comeback :laughing:

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Keith was always entertaining :slight_smile: I never understood list shifter though. Oh well!

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Keith is gone? Really? I mean Keith WAS Bubble.

Shut it all down. :sweat_smile:

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LFG! :rocket:
Thanks for posting @philip2
Shared with the team internally so they can all read it too.

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I still think charging for WUs in Dev mode is criminal, but at least Dev mode works!

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What a lovely post to read, thank you for taking the time to do that. :folded_hands:t2::sun:

Bubble just needs to iron out a few of the niggles (often small things) and it’ll be in a really strong place. As someone who’s used it for aoprox 5 years now I can say it never fails to put a smile on my face and amaze me. Kinda a shame that users can’t truly appreciate its many strengths until they’ve used it for quite some time. Discovering plugin building recently has opened up a whole new world as well. Amazing.

Long live the bubble!