Monthly Community Update -- February 2025

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:

  • 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.

  • “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

  • AI:

    • 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!

    • 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.

  • 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!).

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • We featured Hampton, a founder community built by Sam Parr and Joe Speiser on the showcase page. Check it out here.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • We had five new people join the team to kick off the year! Welcome to:

    • Jared, joining as a growth marketing associate

    • Melissa, joining as an account executive

    • Zach, joining as a senior engineering manager

    • Pavel, joining as a senior engineer

    • Louis, joining as a sales development representative

Thanks as always for reading.

— Josh and Emmanuel

36 Likes

for those that might be skimming through the announcement

This is what you are looking for :point_down:

7 Likes

100% Agree, the more natural that software development can feel to humans - the better.

This is great news! @nick.carroll :fire:

Huge – I no longer have to manage this off Bubble

5 Likes

At the moment, this is just super frustrating to use. Any update on when this will get fixed. Going back and forth where it resets each time is getting supper annoying. I still need to open a different tab because it’s pretty much useless at the moment. Love the idea, can’t wait for it to be usable. :blush:

15 Likes

Although I agree with most of this and enjoy using Bubble…

I think you’re losing the information war on this issue based solely on your pricing model.

I’m quite sure you’re aware of the posts out there on the internet from previous users etc. that have an issue with your pricing.

Until you fix the pricing model I think that no matter what steps Bubble takes to advance, they’ll still have the stigma of the whole pricing thing.

I have seen several comments from users who started with Bubble to build an MVP and then discovered the pricing was either out of control or confusing.

Fix the pricing and quit ignoring it as something that users will eventually come to accept.

I’m saying all this because I want Bubble to succeed…right now the pricing issue is the elephant in the room that gets ignored when these monthly updates are announced.

21 Likes

@josh I know you and the team are well-positioned to build some amazing AI tools on top of Bubble that will take app building to the next level. No one better than Bubble is suited to take advantage of this wave.

I imagine a near future were most new customers can just prompt their way to an MVP, along with pro users like us that can take those apps to the next level.

AI will just takes us to the next level, not replace us.

I would love to see even the ability to have AI integration to build custom plugins based on the user’s needs, help people implement APIs through Bubble Connector, help create and optimize workflows, improve UI/UX, optimize for workflow consumption and more.

If you can pull off deep AI integration, not just at the surface level, but everywhere on Bubble, than you will create the ultimate super power.

2 Likes

@fede.bubble what’s it going to take to get WU calculation bugs addressed? Kinda disappointed to see them keep popping up so heavily and still no formal acknowledgment of it.

I can’t imagine the number of customers being over charged that have absolutely no idea.

16 Likes

+1 with this. This is super annoying!!

5 Likes

Here is my take, Bubble needs to be more beginner friendly and toolbar UI changes shouldn’t even be on monthly announcements. We need more native solutions or remove the plugin loads first logic

2 Likes

I could be totally wrong…

but after 10 years of working in the business world, I highly suspect either an attempt to be bought out or an offer to be bought out is already on the table.

The pricing thing just doesn’t add up in the current climate.

Something just seems off and the lack of response on the issue is a question.

1 Like

This is great, and I can’t wait til we can use “This Row’s Thing” too

EDIT: This appears to be fixed now. Thanks, guys.

@josh This is causing styles in the destination app to get overridden or deleted. New style variables come in as random colors that weren’t in either app.

Please please please revert this feature or fix the bug, or do something. I’ve now spent HOURS adding back my color variables, reconnecting to styles, combing through my apps, fixing things.

…Honestly really surprised this new thing was included in your monthly update when several devs are having this problem and have reported it as a significant bug.

4 Likes

Also it’s a pain in the a** to address the color name to the actual color, once that have a GIANT GAP between it.
NAME OF STYLE <-------------------------------------------------------------------> #FFFFFF

It would be nice to bring the things together.

I have submitted a “bug report” yesterday about it (when you paste a element it get overridden or deleted) and today, they sent me an email. It’s fixed (at least, it was fixed when I checked).

1 Like

@josh Can someone at Bubble please explain why the head of community has an NFT of a flaming skull as their profile photo?

The voice of the brand is a faceless drawing. It doesn’t feel like we’re interacting with a real person at all.

1 Like

If you’ve been screaming for improvements to the shockingly undercooked WU system, this is an apt assessment of the brand😂

Nothing against @fede.bubble !

Announcement Post

@josh this doesn’t seem to have happened yet and unfortunately Laura is no longer a member of the team to follow up to find out the progress on the hard work the team was making in this area. I was part of a few calls for this project and was really excited by what I had seen during those calls, the tools and UI/UX were awesome, so why have they not been released? Are they even still being worked on?

Most users responding to the change in that thread are of the same mindset, it would be nice to see the feature full realized and not left half baked as just changing where we press a button doesn’t do much to improve user experience around backend workflows tab.

Will this allow for an increase in the number of items in a list field? Currently 10,000 is a lot, but if the database is going to be faster, perhaps we could get more items onto a list field, maybe 100,000?

Extremely, especially after the build up to it left many expecting the issues we have with it to not exist, such as the refreshing of the tabs as we navigate them.

I don’t suspect they could possibly be entertaining a buyout with the WU pricing bugs issue. It wouldn’t take a very experienced corporate lawyer to demonstrate at the least civil liability or potentially criminal for fraudulently inflated valuation with all the bugs in the system…at least from my perspective and testing there are lots of bugs in it. Especially with all the bug reports, public posts etc., it would be impossible for Bubble to claim they were unaware, which again, a halfway decent lawyer would likely be able to claim gross negligence on their part for not having addressed them prior to a sale so as to provide prospective buyers realistic figures.

No corporate entity will want to be left holding the hot potato once all these AI built MVPs start incurring extreme WU usage bills or worst, experience being overcharged due to bugs in WUs…could you imagine how that would look, “you mean to tell me your company has an AI that builds the apps for the user, you charge the user based on a pricing model that has known bugs, and certain approaches to building can lead to higher costs for the same result, and your AI didn’t build optimally in regards to the usage metrics of the pricing model?”

Any existing user of Bubble should want to see them succeed, because overall the product and service they provide is incredible, so who would want to see that go away? Because of that, all users should be persistent in their demand that Bubble fix the WU bugs, make the tooling as robust as it should have been from the beginning and commit to continuously looking into ways to improve those tools further, and ways to reduce the consumption of WUs (ie: making the codebase more efficient?) I know personally, my attempts to get WU issues addressed is because I want Bubble to succeed as a platform.

I think somebody already released something like this

If you go to ChatGPT directly, give it the link to the API docs, you’ll likely be capable of getting that put together.

What I want to see from Bubble is to focus on what they should and allow the community to build all the things to layer on top.

I don’t care if Bubble makes the platform easier to learn for new users, because I trust that if Bubble wasn’t putting out new educational content, or making little tweaks to the editor layout, the community would be, and in fact, likely better than Bubble does. Since Bubble is putting out so much educational content, it likely makes 5-10 would be educators not put out their own content since they likely see it as futile to try and attempt to compete with Bubble on views. And with that, Bubble loses (again fictional numbers here) 5-10 would be promoters…if a community member sets out to create educational content they will be putting resources into the promotion of that content, which in turn is promoting Bubble itself, so Bubble could potentially be saving resources in marketing as they would likely have more community members providing content that promotes Bubble at no expense to Bubble, not to mention saving resources on staff, interns and independent contractors they pay to create this content or make the slight changes to the editor.

I don’t care if Bubble builds an AI tool for helping to build Bubble apps, community members already have and continue to develop new ones. Let the community do it. It will lead to more innovative approaches likely, will create new businesses around it, and obviously provide more of that free promotional content for Bubble that community led endeavors do…its called “Other People’s Money”. Leverage the resources of others to advance your own success.

I’m more interested in seeing Bubble focus on addressing long standing bugs, feature requests, performance, stability, ensuring top notch support and adding tools that expand our app possibilities as these are the things the community can not do.

Since Bubble left security up to the community, look what happened. They bought out a community started company and recently another community started security tool was launched. The same should happen with AI…Bubble didn’t need to do it.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

12 Likes

A bit disappointing this community update, long standing issues not being addressed (f.i. pricing inconsistencies), more riding the AI hype train, mentioning adding an icon (backend workflows now have their own tab), really?

Please listen to community members who care about Bubble:

10 Likes

Does the AI app generator creates apps with the WU’s best practices?

How can it know if people from the community are seeing bugs on it?

Looking forward to the launch though and see how this will impact Bubble landscape :slight_smile: