I’m considering building the native mobile variant of my app. Obviously, that requires a lot of time investment and would only be meaningful if that gave a real push for new user onboarding and value for existing users.
I’m reading a lot of things, mostly good, about Bubble.io mobile beta launch, but there seem to be some significant issues remaining which are kind of worrying.
Long story short: is this still too early to make the move, or can I start building and expect it to work already?
Native mobile is great. I think you should do it with an understanding of the following limitations/bugs:
single image upload is extremely slow
multi-image upload is so slow that it’s not usable
both image upload issues can be mostly solved in different ways (plugins, webview, etc.) until bubble actually deploys a better solution.
there’s no way to scroll to an element on the view (page) or element in list.
There’s no deep linking.
With the above listed, there’s so many immediate benefits. App store distrubution, feelign like a real darn app (not some wrapped garabage but now a truly native swipe and feel is amazing), location services, maps OMG….maps is so good compared to PWA, and more that you jsut need to expereince.
I think you’ll be blown away. It was the same superpower I felt after first discovering bubble web app years ago.
They still don’t have in-app purchases built. I’m not sure how so many people have success stories without IAP, unless they’re selling offline products and can use something like Stripe. For me at least, this absolutely hamstrings my business. I now have my app deployed for free because I figured having users is better than not having users. But let me say that again - I have my app deployed for FREE when I’ve put months of time and money into building it and built a business model on charging subscriptions for this app. As of now, there’s no expected release date for IAP. It was supposed to be “in the coming weeks” from Paris, but then the Nov update said that roadmap features are being deprioritized for general stability and performance.
This is the not the first feature I’ve considered to be absolutely critical that Bubble did not have built for mobile, but it’s the only one remaining.
Also, the same as someone above, my app does crash periodically and whenever I push any update (even OTA) the user has to reopen the app two times.
And I’ve had a ticket in for 1.5 months for something that is preventing me from launching on Google Play. Crickets. I was getting periodic updates saying “we’re still waiting for engineering to look at this, but we’re understaffed and we’re sorry.” I haven’t even gotten one of those in a while.
Bottom line, I’m now rebuilding my app on a different platform. But that’s just me. It seems like plenty of people are happy.
