Having spent the last 2 years developing on Bubble, I’m genuinely keen to see the platform evolve and improve positively. Based on my experiences, here’s a list of feedback and suggestions for the Bubble team:
Feedback and Suggestions for Improving the Bubble Platform
- Internal Dogfooding: Bubble’s development teams should actively use the platform to build applications. This would help them directly experience and understand user frustrations.
- Clear Error Messages: Provide specific, actionable error messages instead of vague ones like “issues with main bubble cluster.” Explain clearly what the underlying problem is.
- Platform Stability: Improving overall platform stability needs to be a top priority.
- Workflow Editor: The workflow menu/editor could be significantly improved:
- Offer a horizontal layout option.
- Allow dragging and dropping steps for easier reordering.
- Provide better visibility into what each step is actually doing.
- Native Looping: Implement robust, native looping capabilities that are safer and more reliable than using workarounds or potentially unstable recursive workflows.
- Plugin Maintenance & Improvement: Bubble’s own native plugins need consistent updates and feature enhancements:
- The Slider Input plugin is very basic and lacks customization options.
- The Rich Text Editor still suffers from various bugs.
- Native Table elements should be a high priority, as dashboards and analytics (which heavily rely on tables) are common in many applications.
- Animations: Improve the performance and smoothness of collapse/expand and other UI animations.
- Animation Preview: Fix the animation previews, which currently do not work correctly within the workflow tab.
- App Search Tool: Enhance the App Search Tool’s performance and accuracy, especially for large applications where it struggles to find elements efficiently.
- Editor Performance (Large Apps): Address the constant freezing and crashes that occur in the editor when working on large applications, likely related to memory management.
- Metrics: Improve the server capacity metrics to provide clearer insights into what is consuming resources and causing potential bottlenecks.
- Logging System: Overhaul the logging system. It’s currently difficult to decipher, often showing many “lookup-unique id” entries. It needs better visual formatting and clarity to help developers understand events and debug issues effectively.
- Data Field Deletion: When a data field is deleted, the editor should proactively flag or warn about its usage on all affected pages and elements, rather than silently failing and showing fields like “data_name_deleted”.
- Image Responsiveness: Make working with responsive images easier and more intuitive.
- Native Charting Plugin: Bubble should offer its own native plugin for creating charts and graphs, reducing the dependency on paid third-party solutions.
- Translation Feature:
- Improve the stability of the App Text / Translation feature to prevent freezes.
- Allow exporting only the missing or untranslated text strings, not the entire set every time.
- Consider integrating native AI translation capabilities to significantly speed up the process for multi-language applications.
- Styles and Merging: Fix bugs related to Styles during branch merges, which often lead to corrupted or duplicated styles.
- Merge Stability: Address the frequent editor crashes and long recovery times experienced during the merge process.
- Plugin Free Trials: Encourage or enable a free trial option for paid plugins. It’s difficult for developers to commit to paying significant amounts (e.g., $60) without being able to test a plugin first and verify its impact and suitability for their product.