I’ve had this happen randomly to me, without even having access to version control! One day, my data type suddenly went “missing” and I had like ~600 errors reported. But weirdly, when I clicked on each of the errors, the issue mysteriously resolved itself without me having to do anything at all. It however required me to click on all 600 errors, one by one, to resolve them.
Thankfully that only happened once… but still, not fun!
My API connector tab is so messy, as I haven’t been able to reorganise it since the day I started learning to use bubble. It’s definitely another area that needs a lot of love, pretty sure 99% of the community would’ve taken API connector upgrades over AI generation.
I remember hearing the co-founders publicly acknowledging much of their growth can be attributed to the work of agencies and freelancers, a truth that should not be forgotten.
In the Bubble insiders webinar the marketing head pleaded maybe 4 or 5 times for agencies and freelancers to share stories of their apps or client apps in order to help Bubble with marketing content, so clearly the team knows they need agencies and freelancers to continue to use Bubble to continue to drive growth and new client acquistion.
It makes complete sense for Bubble to align themselves closely with the agencies and freelancers in terms of marketing efforts and client funnels, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to keep adding more agencies and freelancers while simultaneously retaining all existing but making developing in Bubble more enjoyable and less costly.
I can honestly say, I likely lose $15,000 USD a year in lost productivity because of bugs, editor crashes and all the other issues that have gone unaddressed for years now.
I honestly do not want to take any more of my time to continue the list which is definitely longer.
If I’m losing money by Building on Bubble because of lost productivity due to long standing issues not being addressed, it begins to feel like Bubble doesn’t value the agency or freelancer any longer and do not have any incentive to improve the core product so as to retain more of the user base that drives most of the business.
The biggest breaking bug in the editor is when you switch between backend and frontend workflows and it totally resets the page when you toggle between them and you lose your place, I understand the idea behind adding the buttons there but it entirely defeats the purpose of having it if it doesn’t work. Please bring this up to the team, it’s as if the dev team doesn’t use their own product.
This doesn’t happen sometimes it happens every time.
And like ten mins to fix it. Take a clock and time it. 30 mins TOPS!! and bubble, dont pretend that it’s more time because you have to QA it because we all know who your defacto QA team is… and while we hate being involuntarily signed up for QA, at the very least, give us the quality of life improvements we beg for in leiu of paying us to do all your QA!
And because of all the wonky editor issues, it’s nearly impossible to have more than 3 bubble tabs open simultaneously, so you can’t duplicate tabs and switch back and forth, which would be a jenky fix anyways
I for one voted 0
I think they’ve made some great improvements to the editor over the last 6-12 months to make it more organised for the average user on many levels (new sidebar etc), and they’ve made great improvements to the power user also (e.g returned custom events data).
Not being a shill here, and good to voice your concerns - but credit where credit’s due
P.s The new app view is doing a good job to promote reusable elements as components to a page rather than a ‘reusable element’ (i.e it doesn’t need to be used twice to be useful), and is prepping for the mobile editor interface.
Of course we can focus on the positives and give credit, as I do, when and where deserved, but we also must hold them to account and express the frustrations that cause our work/productivity to be hindered and therefore our incomes diminished. At the end of the day it makes no difference if it looks prettier and doesn’t work properly or how many power user features are made available if they are not living up to expectations or being actively upgraded based on feedback…there are more examples of negatives than positives over the past 6-12 months that make working in the editor less enjoyable and less efficient.
Do you personally ever experience a bug or buggy behavior negatively impacting your workflow? If so, what are they?
Sure, but mobile reusables will not work with web pages, nor will web reusables work with mobile pages, as far as I know, so they should definitely be providing a breakdown ability beyond just mobile and web and give us web pages, web reusables, mobile views, mobile reusables so we can be more organized in our management of these.
Any chance you could send an email cc’ing all Bubble employees with a link to this thread? Seems like a lot of similar feedback you have previously said would be shared with the team over the last few months has either not reached the right people or wasn’t given enough respect, because the amount of senior Bubblers and the rate at which displeasure and distrust with Bubble is being shared not just on this forum but on X, WhatsApp groups etc is alarming, and nothing meaningful is being done about it. Just a bunch of ‘trust me guys the team is working hard behind the scenes,’ which means nothing to everyday Bubblers who are getting fed up not just every hour every day, but every browser refresh every day.
@josh for your serious attention.
I can concur on this, had several merges cause severe problems because it changes stuff, and not always in a way that creates errors. This resulted in a breakdopwn in processes within production, which was not fun.
To the point that on one project I will no longer merge branches as the risks are too high. I’ll use a branch as a sandbox/experimental environment, and if all is well, just copy and paste w/workflows (when it used to work) or slog it through recreating it step by step.
100% appreciate a lot of the features bubble has implemented recently, but it is definitely quite frustrating to be faced with wholesale editor changes that still feel like they’re in BETA.
Biggest pains points in the core experience are:
we appreciate bubble for giving a starting point but it cannot cover all things when your business logic become complicated.
Just one scenario: We have a table of items which contain +20k rows and our users asked us to give grouped + aggregated view for multiple different scenarios (Do not event mention that you can do that on the client side using things like “group by”. It 100% percent wrong approach. It should be done on the server side and should work seamlessly ). And it was not feasible in bubble because u cannot use SQL on app database so we end up offloading that logic to Xano + Node js and it works perfect. Now we considering(already did actually) moving away everything.
Not to mention u cannot even uses promises for async workflows.
Bubble is good enough for really small and simple apps but def not for a big ones.
Sure I come across quirks here and there but for me it’s like 90% positive.
Personally, my productivity hasn’t been hindered but improved 
- compared to be 12 months ago the editor is way faster ( and I’m still operating on 8gb of ram XD ) and a slew of other improvements.
My browser auto refreshes (I have configured it to refresh instead of crash like it would otherwise) now about every 15-30 minutes when I am in heavy work mode (jumping between pages/elements etc).
Before this latest feature release it was about every 1-2 hours.
6+ months ago it was closer to 2-3 hours.
Bubble is a memory hog and the last few feature releases have made it progressively worse.
I work on a range of apps - some very large and complex, and others are small and lightweight. The small apps are fast and never crash and that’s likely how 80% of bubble users experience the platform so I accept I am in the minority with the large complex apps I have.
Productivity on the larger apps has definitely dropped significantly due to the constant memory refreshes and slower loading of the editor.
I applaud your mentality. I have been working on my 6 year old to have a more positive outlook on things. When I ask how was your day, he says ‘bad’ and the reason is that this one thing happened that he allowed to ruin his day.
I try to explain to him to not let the negative overshadow the positive, so that if one out of the ten things he did that day was bad, to not dwell on it so that it causes the good to be less enjoyable. I’m also trying to teach him on how to recognize what was the cause of the ‘bad’ part of the day and to find ways to maybe avoid that from happening again, or maybe fixing something that he tried to use but was broken.
In the end, the 10% that is bad can be the 10% that breaks the camel’s back for some. It is this 10% that people shouldn’t make their voices unheard because of satisfaction with the other 90%. Instead, they should help voice their frustrations so as to help be part of the solution by making those in charge and capable of fixing that 10%, see the reason to fix that 10% with a bit of urgency, rather than ignoring them.
Ultimately, the post is not a rant, or a venting of frustration, it’s a call for help, a signal of my desire to help in some way to improve Bubble for all.
What are the things that are in that 10% camp of yours? They may be the same things that have others saying ‘I hate Bubble now’ and the more voices Bubble hears from expressing the same sentiment, the more powerful each of those voices has become in order to effectuate change for the better of all.
I personally view myself as an investor in Bubble. I started in early 2018 and consider myself an ‘early adopter’ (I believe anybody who came in before first funding of $6million in June of 2019 to be an early adopter). I have devoted my time and energy into becoming an expert. I have shared this expertise with countless others for free as a way of giving back to the community in support of furthering the Bubble.io platform. So, when I see things happening that are concerning for me, that don’t necessarily just affect my ability to perform my daily tasks, but affect my perceived long term viability of Bubble, I choose to express my concerns in hopes they get addressed.
Over 7+ years now, it has worked most of the time, which is a fantastic expression of Bubble’s desire to be better…point is, Bubble listens, but only when people speak up, and as anybody or company that wants to be the ‘industry leader’ or the ‘best of the best’ 90% is not good enough.
Move to toddle.dev + a backend of your choice. You won’t regret it 
Just had a quick look at this and the UI looks great. It’s so funny that being as used to bubble’s UI as I am, I forget just how bad/old fashioned it actually is. I can’t even reduce the database tab to half screen width (macbook pro) without it breaking the page… pretty crazy for an app builder with built-in responsive controls.
I have significantly reduced opening Bubble editor now as I can’t even work on it for five minutes properly without getting frustrated.
The editor is a mess in many ways. Being slow, crashing, API connector hanging on each character typing etc etc many issues which there is no point reporting as Bugs too.
I primarily build and run my own app and now I am more in the mode of “Let the app be as it is instead of building further” as the editor is unusable for me.
Of course probably like I have highlighted in this thread and this post, I am probably amongst the poor folks having low ram machines. And developers and testers within Bubble team (though not sure if there are testers in Bubble or it is just us) use some super high end systems or use super light apps to develop/test so they don’t feel what I go through.
Future facing features are exciting, but they should never take priority over core offerings like stable hosting or a useable smooth editor experience. At some point innovation needs to pause to ensure existing users aren’t being neglected or underserved, it is bubbles duty since they only offer platform locked hosting.
I’ve quoted multiple messages from the bubble team in the recent months claiming that new features (ex wf builder, page select rework, expression builder, etc) are being built to help large scale complex apps, but in reality large scale apps even built correctly for performance aren’t able to use the features smoothly.
ditto and +1.
I can’t open actions, can’t copy them and often mouse clicks are totally unresponsive…
This is how I started with bubble. Once the WU was introduced however, they stopped recommending bubble and moved over to flutterflow and have been very happy with it since. I tried that platform for a bit, but the number of APIs being so limited in the free versions meant it was not even possible to get even the most basic functionality up and running.
If I was freelancing today, I probably wouldn’t be using bubble, as I don’t see it as viable for a startup (especially an unfunded one) any more thanks to the WU and vendor lock-in. I’m okay with using it for now at least, developing my front-end and using a Xano backend with client-side plugins - this is kinda the best of both worlds IMO.
