Bubble has lost its way

Meta
1

Have you noticed that Bubble is kind of like a pet? The moment it gets a shiny new toy, it forgets all about the old ones, leaving them unfinished, outdated, or completely ignored.

  • Bubble’s plugins? Outdated.

  • Fast loading speeds? Still unfinished.

  • Font Awesome icons? Outdated.

  • Magic code (besides magic link)? Apparently impossible.

  • Mouse & keyboard interactions? Unfinished.

  • Native PDF creation? Unfinished.

  • Performance? Down every other week.

  • Table element? Unfinished.

  • Workload unit bugs? Ignored.

But hey, at least now we can generate a blocky, uninspired page with AI.

And let’s not even talk about design. Have you ever spent hours fine-tuning your app’s look, only for it to still feel like a stiff relic from the early 2000s? Seriously, @Bubble, would it really be that hard to replace those clunky popups with something smoother? Check this out:

Now that’s smooth. It feels like using a mobile app straight from the web.

And to be fair, it’s not all bad. Bubble is amazing in many ways, but come on, @Bubble… is this really the best you can do?

36 Likes
2

@fede.bubble please make sure team is aware of this post. Similar sentiment shared as other posts and replies keep popping up.

It all should serve as a wake up call, the nice one our mothers gave us with a soft shake, before our older brother just pours a cold water bucket on our heads, soaking the pillow, sheets, blanket, mattress and floor.

15 Likes
3

I think most of the problem is the tech debt bubble has. The dev team have an uphill battle to try and upgrade the platform whilst keeping existing functionality.

With every new feature I think “this would be great! …if it worked” and then a while later followed by “I hate this new feature it makes the editor even worse. oh well, it can’t get any worse than this”

Followed by a new feature being released some weeks later (whilst the previous feature is still half broken) and somehow they manage to make the platform even worse yet again.

I’m at the point now where I’ve given several YEARS of “they’ll get their act together” that I no longer have any confidence that they will and I am actively testing other platforms to see which I’ll use for new projects.

Old projects I’ll keep on bubble and maybe they’ll figure it out one day but new projects I will not subject myself or my clients to more of this madness.

Sorry to say that I am now firmly in the “moving away from bubble camp”. It’s not so bad (yet) that I’m going to rebuild all my projects in a new platform but it is bad enough that I am no longer recommending bubble to new clients.

7 Likes
4

bump for the visibility

1 Like
5

I can add following to this list:

  • Version control
  • WU analysing tools
  • Logs analysing tools
  • Expression editor
  • Error checking in editor

On all these some little work was done and then forgotten.

And the other shiny toys which I do not know who asked for:

  • Redesigning navigation
  • Redesigning toolbar

There were others too, but my memory is failing. I am sure good majority of those were not really asked by anyone.

1 Like
6

Can we talk about the crappy lighthouse scores as well?

2 Likes
7

They are but it’s unrealistic to think a product org can pivot directions from one week to the next. A lot of you already touched on similar points to these here in your other post How many times a day do you think “I hate Bubble now”?

1 Like
8

A decent date and time picker, as the current one looks like it’s from the prehistoric era

5 Likes
9

I wonder if bubble should open source these native plugins and allow the community to assist in building them as @fede.bubble mentioned, they can’t pivot at this time (I’m assuming due to limited dev resources)

2 Likes
10

While I do agree that there is a lot of things that can be “finished” on Bubble’s end, don’t say all of our plugins are out-dated!

Built App-Drawer to make things effortless for menu’s and navigation. Have a gander. I’ll have to make a video tutorial on it soon. You can make everything dynamic, and send data to and from your drawer components, to have one universal drawer per app. No extra elements or gimmicks needed (floating groups, groups, etc.).

1 Like
11

They are not talking about all plugins but Bubble’s plugins from what I understand.

1 Like
12

They are but it’s unrealistic to think a product org can pivot directions from one week to the next.

You guys are pivoting directions we DID NOT ASKED, that is the problem.

2 Likes
13

I don’t think anybody in the forum is naive enough to believe that it is possible for Bubble to pivot directions in a week, nor do I think anybody is really asking Bubble to pivot directions. Instead people are asking Bubble to change some procedures and stick with the prescribed procedures from past incidents.

I think Josh did a great job with this post as is greatly appreciated and goes so far in helping to restore trust and faith as it is transparent, and best of all, shows Bubble falling on the sword and then taking quantifiable steps to remedy situations.

An area outside the discussion from Josh post on stability and performance, that is a big concern as has been expressed is editor issues. One way Bubble can improve is to follow the prescriptive procedure that I think was discussed some 12 months ago. Basically, it was, any new feature be released initially as an ‘experimental feature’ and was opt in only, and only once all opt in users provided feedback, bugs were fixed, missing features were added, was it then released into the editor as a default feature.

What happened with the new release of the page/reusable dropdown caused significant reduction in workflow efficiencies for developers. On every page change in the editor, it took around 15-30 seconds to get the page list open and select (not to mention the automatic scroll up). That feature should not have been released as a default feature the way it was, and should have been opt in only (I can’t imagine how frustrating it was for all those still waiting to be admitted to mobile native beta test and have that feature pushed into their editors when it wasn’t even needed for them at this stage).

So in regards to that particular issue which I think really was the catalyst for this new wave of discontent and people using the forum to speak their minds and vent their frustrations, I think Bubble may have been able to ‘roll it back’ quickly and make it an ‘experimental feature’ as a ‘quick fix’.

For me, I think there are different things playing a role in the way people may be feeling.

  1. Performance and stability of live apps - addressed by Josh very well in his post linked above
  2. New feature releases in editor not Q&A tested by Bubble - simple resolution that was prescribed in past and outlined above; all are experimental features and only released as default experiences until fully vetted and issues resolved.
  3. Sense that new, highly anticipated features, are released ‘half-baked’ and not living up to the hype and being left as is

For that 3rd category, obviously this is not a pivot of org direction needed as a resolution situation either. This is more in line with a prescriptive resolution that is procedural.

  1. Team lead or engineer does the showcase forum post - this already happens
  2. Users provide feedback via forum post or a dedicated feedback form for that single new released feature
  3. Team that worked on the feature monitor the forum post and feedback form submissions for 2-3 weeks after initial release and put in the low hanging fruit fixes immediately where possible.
  4. Team over course of 1-2 months after release continue to implement all the ‘missing’ features to turn the new feature into a ‘fully realized feature’ rather than leaving it ‘half-baked’.
  5. Team lead/engineer who posted in the forum continues to update the forum showcase page with status reports of the resolved issues and planned improvements/fixes implemented and being worked on.

What the above will do is make it so that people can believe that the much hyped/anticipated features, once released, may not be exactly as they hoped for or needed the feature to be, but know that within a short period of time, the Bubble teams dedication to customer satisfaction, will result in that newly released feature living up to most users expectations.

An example post is this

Only has the one post from the Bubble employee, another 50+ posts from users about bugginess, missing features etc. and after one week a post that the team is keeping an eye on the thread, but nothing from the OP on the status of any fixes, improvements, plans put into place to resolve issues raised. That lack of follow up work I believe is where a lot of dissatisfaction from new feature releases come from, and can be remedied with procedural changes, and not an organizational pivot.

8 Likes
14

Exactly.

1 Like
15

@josh @emmanuel @kate.mcnally @fede.bubble, please take this well-considered response from Bosten seriously. Please provide some feedback that doesn’t brush us off, but shows that you value the community and your users.

2 Likes
16

This is the 3rd separate thread in a few days bemoaning Bubble, idk if I’m living on a different planet here but the platform seems absolutely fine to me, and I have to say a lot of the discourse on these threads really seems overblown? One of them was called something like 'how much do you ‘hate’ bubble?

I’ve been on this platform full-time for 5 years now, and it’s gotten better every year, and none of these issues affect our team’s ability to build a pretty successful application. We lose maybe 15mins a day waiting for page loads, it’s not actually that big of a deal? Downtime also seems much less now than it was a few years ago to the point we don’t even think about it. These kind of threads constantly being posted by a tiny portion of users on repeat is going to make new users think there’s more issues than there actually is.

6 Likes
17

Yeah, although I do agree, as I may need to make some updates here I think myself soon, but nothing on the development side has really changed for us… All I see is the same thing being made over and over now. We need more development features to improve the community additions and modifications.

18

Obviously I’m talking about a fairly complicated app, but on the one I’ve been working on for two years, needing 42 different plugins (including a number of paid ones) and 4 API connectors, multi-calls, that’s a lot anyway. For me it means that there are too many things not integrated into Bubble.

19

For me, using API connector is just a normal thing that any low/no code tool have. I’m curious however to see all your plugins…

1 Like
20

Hmmmm…

4 Likes