Can I ship a reliable app with Bubble Mobile?

Mobile Beta
1

Hi everyone,

I currently have a Bubble app live on the App Store and Play Store (built with Buildnatively).

I got access to the Bubble Mobile beta in March last year and spent a few weeks rebuilding my app. By June, I decided to stop because I was running into too many bugs and Android performance issues.

I came back to it yesterday, and I’ve already hit some bugs again. From what I’m reading on the forum, it also seems like there are still quite a few bugs and performance problems.

So before I invest another few weeks into this, I’d like to ask:

Can Bubble Mobile currently support a reliable production app?
I mean a fully functional app, stable, with no major bugs, and usable by thousands of monthly active users.

Has anyone here shipped a Bubble Mobile app with a large user base and had a good experience so far?

Thank you
Thibaut

2

Quick answer is NO… Although it looks like promising developments are being made.

What you need to know:

  • Bubble just recently released a new architecture that broke their legacy native framework. Android apps are (reportedly) a mess, iOS apps are heavily impacted. Bubble is reportedly working on a fix. Expectations are high as this new React Native architecture is the foundation to Bubble’s future mobile native growth.

  • To this date, you can very hardly release JUST a native mobile app, as you will also need a web-app as a back up interface to fill in the (many) gaps left by current native missing functionalities.

  • Native is still a beta functionality (although you’ll need to pay for it), there is no clear agenda or communication as to what priority Bubble gives to this feature against other current developments (Bubble Agent, etc…). It’s quite frustrating to be paying for a beta, spending time and resources on it, not knowing if the production-ready state will be achieved in 1 or 6 months ( it’s already been out there for more than a year).

  • There are still a very limited native elements available, so you’ll probably have to add extra plugins that’ll increase your bill further.

  • It does not seem that a lot of users have made the leap of faith yet, let alone managing to publish on the stores.

    My app is already released on iOS store (just before they released the new broken architecture). I truly believe in the potential of this feature and I’m 100% committed to it. I just hope that things would move a bit quicker and priorities would be defined clearly on the bubble side. I have strong mixed feelings about paying for a feature that is clearly not ready.

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