I am new to Bubble

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Hello, I have been a web designer/developer for 15 years, and I am excited to dive into Bubble.is to see if it will work well for future projects.

I have one main question right now. It wasn’t quite clear to me is Bubble.is is really ready for production projects. I know there are examples of others, namely Qoins, that have done it, but I also saw some info that makes me cautious. So, 2 questions: Do you feel confident launching a for-profit web application using Bubble.is? And how about a native mobile app?

Thanks!

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  1. Yes, with Bubble you make ready-for-market applications. Judge for yourself.
  2. Yes Bubble is an excellent development tool in my estimation.
  3. For native apps, Bubble offers a “wrapper” type process for you application based on a page that you have to develop in a very specific way. Bubble is mostly for web-apps. There are many posts here about the subject so I won’t repeat it here.

Rick

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I would not use Bubble for a production mobile app. I would, however, use it as a backend for native apps built elsewhere.

I have, and will continue, to use it as my solution for most web app use cases, and definitely for MVPs for my customers looking to validate their product concepts.

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Thanks Rick, I don’t need anything repeated :slight_smile:, I’m digging into the forums and documentation. I’m just wanting some re-assurance that this is a worthwhile pursuit.

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Next questions:
Is there a development roadmap somewhere?
Is native mobile development a goal for bubble or just a side function?
Is Bubble technically in beta?

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I started using Bubble to build a prototype of our app and as bubble matured, realized we’d be able to use it for our production-grade application.

It has its’ quirks and doesn’t meet all of our requirements for production-grade entirely, but I’m very happy to be using Bubble instead of custom code – we can just get so much more done with Bubble than we could with custom code.

That said, I think a few of the big gotchas are:

  • Bubble’s user-facing speed is okay, but not amazing. Custom code can be faster but only once you’ve optimized it (which takes a good amount of time). Additionally, Bubble continues to improve here so the margin narrows.
  • The version control/release is really easy, but not nearly powerful enough for a large-scale application. There’s no way to branch code. So, when you push your development version live all of the changes that are in progress get pushed live. This works fine for 1 developer. Works well enough for 2. At 3 it starts to get hard and if you want 10 developers working on it, then that’s not currently viable (unless there’s a workaround that I’m not yet aware of)
  • The searchability of the logs is a big constraint. Takes a lot longer to find information within it than if we had our logs in our own database.
  • There are some constraints on the UI which aren’t ideal, but we’ve found ways to work around most everything. Sometimes it requires custom code, but I guess it’s a good sign when our frustration is “oh, we’ll have to do this with custom code” which happens to be the alternative to using Bubble.
  • If you’re looking to build a team, it’d be very hard to find experienced Bubbler developers still. The community is still very small (but growing) and Bubble has a learning curve like any new programming language would.

Those are the big challenges, imo. I think the flip side is:

  • You get an amazing amount of working features/capabilities out of the box. Want to push testing server to prod - that takes 30 seconds. Want to load images to S3, no set-up needed. Want to use a CDN, already done. Want auto-suggest features, takes 15 mins to build.
  • Bubble continues to improve so the constraints of today continually shrink.
  • Bubble’s team is highly customer-centric. First, they care. Second, they’re responsive. Third, they’ve been smart in designing Bubble and it’s approach so that it works for it’s customers. For example, if you truly need a feature that Bubble doesn’t have they’ll either build it (if others generally need/want it) or they’ll let you sponsor it (so you pay the cost to create it). As such, Bubble’s feature set doesn’t ever seem to block people.
  • You can get more non-technical people involved in the product if you want which makes for better collaboration, fewer silos, and a lot less rework. For example, instead of a Design guy handing off mockups, they can just code them in Bubble in that same amount of time. So, work gets done quicker and there’s no more back and forth with a designer asking for shadows to be added, objects to be moved a few pixels, typos fixed, etc.

So, Bubble isn’t yet great for huge apps with lots of developers unless you want to use it as a bunch of micro-services (which may make it viable but devil is in the details). But, for smaller teams, you can implement changes so much more quickly which makes it a big win for many.

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This is great information! I am use to working as a small team, and a lot of my projects are bootstrapped situations where getting up and running quickly within budget constraints takes priority over being particular about your desires.

I use a number of tools now to squeeze development timelines on the website front, and Bubble.is seems to make this possible for web apps. A am fine with constraints, but don’t love surprises :slight_smile:

Thanks for taking the time to give such a thorough answer, sridharan.s

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