Hi everyone,
This is the February community update. You can read January’s update here.
What’s on our minds
Before I jump into the updates, I want to share how the team and I are thinking about Bubble and the AI landscape.
There’s been a ton of movement, even within the last few weeks, with a bunch of tools that can spit out decently functional code extremely quickly. But building high-quality software with AI is still a challenge. Getting to 80% is relatively easy, but the long-term journey of iterating and fixing bugs once you have actual users is exponentially more difficult. I think these AI code generation tools work best when they’re being used by an experienced engineer who can partner closely with the tool.
In contrast, we believe that the power of AI + the creativity and control of visual development is the best way for all humans to build software and tell computers what to do. Today, Bubble is the leading platform building AI development features for non-experts that are optimized for simplicity of output instead of millions of lines of code. We’re so excited about all the ways we’re going to be bringing AI into the editor to help builders be more creative, powerful, and scalable that we just opened up access to our AI app generator to a lot more people (more on that below). Stay tuned for more on where we’re headed with AI, sooner than you might think!
Everything we shipped last month
A lot of our work this month was focused on the editor.
We announced the public beta for changelog! Changelog makes it much easier to track what changes were made in your app and who made them. The changelog release is part of premium version control, which is available to Agency accounts as well as Growth, Team, and Enterprise plans. We’re rolling it out to everyone on these plans today. For all the details, read the forum post here.
Around 40% of users now have the new toolbar, and we’re expecting to ramp that up to 100% this month. This update makes the editing experience more intuitive and sets us up for initiatives like mobile. (This update also makes it harder to accidentally exit out of the editor by adding an additional click to the Bubble icon at the top.) Read more about the specifics on the forum here.
Surprise! Our AI app generator (which we called “Bubble Assist” at BubbleCon) is now available to all new users who start from bubble.io/ai-features. Existing users: If you’re prompted to join the waitlist, email us at ai@bubble.io, and we’ll take you off the waitlist early.
The workflow tab beta got a few UI updates this month, and we’ve already seen some great user feedback. As a reminder, you can opt in to the workflow tab beta by going to Settings > Versions and scrolling down to Beta Features. If you encounter any unexpected behavior or have product feedback, please submit a report via our chatbot.
Also, backend workflows now have their own tab, which makes them easier to access while building. Read more on the forum here.
The mobile beta got some new features as well, including the shortlist element, which functions similarly to a repeating group or dropdown element. The team is finalizing some internal tests on device location support and is making improvements to Android push notifications.
We also shipped a couple of Boosts to improve the editing experience:
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When you copy and paste elements between Bubble apps, you’ll now bring the style variables over too. Try it out in the editor or check out the demo here.
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“When row is clicked” is now a workflow option for the table element.
Finally, you can update to version 30 of Bubble, which makes calls to backend workflows API tokens more secure by default. Update your app by going to Settings > Versions. Read more about this update here.
What we’re working on
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AI:
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App generation: You’ve generated over one thousand apps so far! Alpha feedback on the AI app generator has been strong, and we’re working on making app output quality even better. We’re excited to get this into the hands of even more users in February!
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AI streaming: For our users who are building AI powered apps, the team completed a proof of concept earlier this month. This feature enables real-time text responses from LLMs like OpenAI. It’s an industry best practice for AI apps and we’re excited to bring it natively to Bubble. We’re aiming to make the prototype production-quality and begin testing by the end of this month.
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Editor: We’re beta testing an updated app interface manager (the “pages” dropdown in the toolbar) with a small number of users as well as our BAMs, and we’re aiming to release this to everyone by the end of February. The app interface manager will make it easier to navigate between different views, regardless of whether you’re building for web or mobile (or both!).
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Workflow tab beta We’re adding zoom controls, which would allow you to use a trackpad to zoom in and out on the canvas. We’re also making a few user experience updates, including improving the search for actions to yield more helpful results and giving a broader overview of workflows, not just actions. With this work, we’re on track to launch the workflow tab to everyone by the end of March!
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Mobile: This month we’re expecting to QA the updated date/time picker, as well as begin alpha testing the mobile plugin editor. We’re also reorganizing the app settings tab by web and mobile. This is primarily a usability update, and will make managing settings for all development more straightforward. Finally, the team is working to bring the debugger into web preview and build out more support for mobile styles.
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Flusk: We’re continuing to make the integration between Flusk and Bubble as seamless as possible. That means syncing roles between Flusk and Bubble, so if you’re on an app as a collaborator, you’ll have the same role in Flusk. We’re also adding entry points to make Flusk’s security features more discoverable to users.
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Platform growth and stability: Behind the scenes, the team is in the middle of a big push to migrate completely off PLV8. This is a significant step in reducing our tech debt, and should make our database significantly more reliable (and faster). We’re also improving how efficiently we use our redis-based caching cluster. Essentially, this work sets us up for greater scale.
ICYMI + How to get involved
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We featured Hampton, a founder community built by Sam Parr and Joe Speiser on the showcase page. Check it out here.
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There are some exciting in-person events happening: Last week we hosted a meetup in the office with a bunch of users from in and around NYC. We got to see some great demos and got to share some of our AI work. Later this spring, Bubble is sponsoring the Create With conference in London. Register here.
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If you’re interested in hosting your own Bubble meetup, we’d love to share it on our Community page. Learn more about submitting your event here.
New hires
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We had five new people join the team to kick off the year! Welcome to:
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Jared, joining as a growth marketing associate
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Melissa, joining as an account executive
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Zach, joining as a senior engineering manager
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Pavel, joining as a senior engineer
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Louis, joining as a sales development representative
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Thanks as always for reading.
— Josh and Emmanuel