Monthly Community Update -- February 2025

Fully agree with @J805.

@josh please prioritize fixing this. At the moment backend workflows having their own tab is essentially useless. It doesn’t feel like an improvement and it frustrates everyone multiple times a day.

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Yeah, fired off an email as shows Waitlist for me.

@josh We badly need a modular expression composer. Nothing else matters. Literally nothing. Having to manually write long expressions any time we want to make a change to the middle is something that’s straight out of the 1980s. It doesn’t make sense even ignoring AI, which you can’t ignore. Put 100% of your development effort into fixing the expression composer and making it modular with reusable expressions and the ability to copy/paste specific sections. It actually feels super embarrassing to be using this platform any time I write an expression, like I could never recommend this to someone on X. They wouldn’t take me seriously.

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For the AI features, we should focus on generating individual components instead of full pages. Rendering entire pages feels excessive at this stage, and users often find it unpredictable. A component-based approach provides more control and clarity.

As for the mobile plugins editor—absolute game-changer! :rocket:

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100% agreed on this.

The expression editor is one of the biggest problems for both beginners and experienced developers. It’s baffling that it hasn’t been more of a priority, especially given the current focus on making the platform easier for new users.

I remember, when I initially found Bubble, not taking the platform seriously at first, specifically because the expression editor was so bad (esp. as a heavy Coda user - theirs is a dream). I assumed Bubble was an old, clunky, poorly-built thing, and I almost just walked away because of it. That was years ago, and it’s barely changed since then.

And it’s not one of those things you just get used to and look past at some point. It is a terrible first impression, and then only becomes more frustrating as you get more advanced.

Whatever you do here - and please, my god, do something! - please don’t approach it as a series of incremental tweaks. I’m sure this is a really complicated undertaking, but IMO there’s no fixing the current editor - it needs a complete rethinking.

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Just curious when we can expect this final piece the the new UI :nerd_face:

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agreed. without that, I don’t have any use for clicking a row… I was shocked the thing wasn’t included. :cry:

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I could not agree more!!

Awesome update here and over the last couple of months with Bubble :rocket:

Great to see how things are evolving and the platform continues to improve.

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Great update @josh.

I’m curious if you guys believe, from your understanding of mobile development, if plugins for mobile would allow us to use the camera for QR code scanning functionality? Or is that functionality that would likely have to be built as a native action by bubble?

Uh huh, sometimes an element has lots of conditions that may result in X, but so choice is create and long series of expressions with “And/or” which if needing to be altered at later date means the entire thing needs to be constructed again (painful if these contain searchs with various constraints in them), or you end up with 7 separate conditions on them.

The former would be fine if you had the ability to switch up one in the centre in a flash.

Hi everyone, thanks for sharing all the thoughtful feedback. We will be passing them along to the internal team.

Additionally, the team released a fix to the styles copy/past change and we are looking into the backend workflow tab feedback. Thank you.

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Again… nothing about WU issues…

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Is it possible to keep this an opt in feature? Based on the forum post to that, the new workflow tab still lacks some crucial functionality / ease of use compared to the existing one. I really don’t understand why so much focus is set on a feature that works pretty decently when there are still key issues in the base functionality that are not addressed – and key functionality still missing despite the community requesting it time and time again.

I second focusing on improving the expression composer as a top priority.
Other things that are imo more important to address rather than focusing on making flashy half baked AI layers on top of the existing product are:

  • Privacy settings based on nested attributes / things in the database
  • Native support for loops in the workflow editor
  • functionality for Unit testing without the need to mock user behavior in the /version-test environment → would be much easier to catch bugs & unintended behavior as we will never test all edge cases logged in as user.
  • adding something like an expression checker where you can see how your page looks in the design tab when certain states / conditions are fulfilled (could also be part of the Unit testing build
  • Native support to attach files to thing after upload / change the attachment later on / attach file to multiple things
  • GDPR compliance (chance to control cookies + where fonts are loaded from + selecting location of db & server resources)
  • Better control of asynchronous / synchronous execution of workflows, also going beyond of the scope of one workflow (e.g. when scheduled API workflows)
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check this too…

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Interested to know if this will result in reducing the WU consumption or WU cost?

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Awesome :fire: I sent en email as I’m prompted to join the waitlist

We’re excited to contribute to the mobile plugin ecosystem and make it even better.

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@josh great update, Platform growth and stability is most critical for me, especially to convince larger clients to go for Bubble

Are there any plans to allow us to choose hosting location without having an Enterprise plan? Maybe as an add-on that one can buy?

We see this requirement for more than half the projects that we come across (we’re based in Germany) and would be really, really great to have!

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@josh, it’s time to listen to the community and prioritize what really matters: performance, stability, security, and fairer pricing. What users truly need are bug fixes, real WU optimization, quality support, and concrete improvements to the platform.

There are numerous users complaining about inflated charges, WU bugs, and a lack of transparency in how they are billed. The least you should do is commit to addressing these concerns and provide clear answers on what is being done to eliminate 100% of WU bugs and make the billing methodology more transparent. As I have already mentioned in the forum, there are multiple reports of users being unfairly charged and WU consumption that is not documented anywhere.

If you don’t want to lower prices, at least listen to the community and clearly explain what is being done to resolve these issues. Stop pretending that everything is fine because it is not. So far, you have not presented any concrete plan to fix these critical issues.

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