Forum Academy Marketplace Showcase Pricing Features

Building a mobile app externally with Bubble as backend?

Question
#1

I’m new to bubble and nocode so please bear with me on the noob question.

I’m looking to build a marketplace product and have been considering a bunch of different no code tools since I’m not a technical person. Based on my research it seems that Bubble has the best integrations and is the most powerful in terms of web apps, however, having a mobile app is really important to me. Most of the Bubble projects I’ve seen that “wrap” their sites and turn them into “native” apps leave a lot to be desired as it’s usually not formatted properly, it’s laggy/buggy, the navigation usually doesn’t work properly etc etc

Is it possible to use a mobile app builder like draftbit (or regular code) to build the mobile app and then use Bubble as a backend so all the customer info/data etc would be synced and the users can have a seamless experience across web/mobile while having a truly native experience?

Thanks for your help in advance!

#2

I personnaly use a lot thunkable. Not perfect but work great with Bubble DB. You also have an offline option in Thunkable so you can send data later when device is connected

#3

Hey @jonathan3,

Welcome to Bubble :slight_smile: This is definitely possible. One popular arrangement for this type of thing seems to be using Dropsource for the native mobile app with Bubble as a backend. Dropsource has an article about integrating Bubble as a backend here: https://help.dropsource.com/docs/documentation/integrating-with-dropsource/api-tools/connect-your-app-to-bubble/

I’ve never actually seen an example of someone who has gone all the way with this, but there are many people who explore this as an option.

Hope this helps.

1 Like
#4

Hello @jonathan3,

It depends on the experience of each programmer :wink:

In other words, you don’t need to learn Xcode or Studio, you don’t need to update every time, and it’s completely free with the Jasonelle tool. Big advantage imo.

I give several tips on my post, and how to build a web app compatible with a native iOS and Android app. My users don’t know it’s a web application. Is that fast? yes.

10 min. Native App in 2020 iOS & Android :large_blue_diamond:

#5

You can do it thru bubble API but I don’t know how fast it will be. Actually I’ll soon try make it myself. We build our first MVP on bubble + webviewgold, and it’s kind ok on iOS but it’s terrible on Android and I don’t know why yet. But we didn’t do much optimization in bubble yet so it might be better. Anyway I will try do some testing using bubble for web and some other tool for mobile with bubble as a backend.

#6

Interesting topic. I played a bit with thunkable, and I am liking it more and more. Question though: Is a integration/sync like proposed in this topic also possible with either Adalo or Glide. How would this architecture look like?

1 Like
#7

Hello John, First of all thanks for the great tutorial. I just wrapped mu bubble app and i am very excited, but i had the isuenof repeating groups not showing. On the webbrowser they work great buy not on the app. Dou you have any advice beacuse I dont even know how to start. Thanks you!!