Hi all,
Happy new year! This is our January community update. Read last month’s update here.
December was a short month due to some much-deserved holiday time — I hope everyone had some time to rest, spend time with the people they love, and reflect on the past year… So before I cover last month’s updates, I want to take a few minutes to look back and celebrate some of my highlights from the past year.
Reflecting on 2023
First of all, in case you missed it, check out the full #BubbleWrapped 2023 recap on the blog. It includes some really fun anecdotes, like the top cities where people use Bubble, the total number of workflows run last year, a lookback at some of our favorite community moments, and a recap of our biggest product releases. Thank you, again, for making this past year so stellar.
Speaking of #BubbleWrapped, I’ve loved seeing screenshots of all your roundups on social media the past few weeks. I thought it might be fun to show you my personal stats! (Emmanuel also shared his on LinkedIn.)
And now, because this monthly update is where we do tend to get a little more technical, I want to call out some of the smaller releases from last year — these are in addition to the big ones we mentioned on the blog — that I’m especially proud of the team for.
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Reusable element properties. This feature has a really high bang for its buck in terms of how much flexibility and power it gives Bubblers. With it, we’re one step closer to making Bubble as flexible as traditional code.
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Custom breakpoints. We definitely plan to build on this feature — it forms the foundation to fully realize our vision for what responsive design on Bubble can look like.
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Our customer support chatbot, which can provide automated answers or connect you with a member of our team, depending on what you need. We haven’t hyped this one much, but we’ve been gradually streamlining and improving the ways our team supports our users. The AI chatbot allows us to answer questions (including those that really need a human) faster. More to come on this front as well!
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Rolling out the first phase of our new design system, including an updated top bar, left bar, and element picker. When Emmanuel and I first built the Bubble editor way back in the day, we created every UI element and bit of CSS on a one-off basis. Neither of us are UX designers, and it shows! So it’s been phenomenal to watch the team steadily convert the editor over to a true design system, which both makes it look crisper and standardizes everything, allowing us to roll out future look-and-feel changes quickly and safely.
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The new backend powering the editor canvas. This was pretty much invisible to you all, but we completely redid the backend that powers our most fundamental feature: the ability to draw elements on the page in the editor. The new backend is both lightning fast — letting it scale to much larger apps — and much easier to build on top of. Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to release the new editing paradigms in the Table element, and it’s going to power some of the native mobile work we’ll be releasing in 2024 as well!
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Our homepage redesign. Over the last few months, we revamped the design of bubble.io. It’s all built on Bubble, of course, and we have an all-star team of internal Bubble Developers who maintain it. They’re also incredibly fast, which I think is a great testament to the value Bubble offers!
We can’t thank this community enough for all the valuable feedback you provide, which drives us to make Bubble better every day. Here’s to you!
Changes we made this month
We made changes to how server capacity is allocated for apps on workload-based plans, which keeps you from incurring workload for partially executed actions and should result in improved performance and reliability during background processing. One benchmarking test we ran on 40,000 simple API workflows showed that the total execution time was cut down by 70%!
We also improved server logs for “delete a list of things,” “copy a list of things,” and “make change to a list of things.” The goal was to give you more detailed and useful information, like the list of things being touched and the query used to generate the list.
Finally, if you have outdated plugins impacted by the AWS node migration installed in your apps, you might now see notifications about it on your homepage and in your plugins tab. You should update your apps’ plugins (or move off deprecated ones) by March 12, 2024. Look out for email reminders.
What we’re working on
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AI: We’ve hit key R&D milestones on the feature that will generate great-looking visual designs with AI, and we’re now officially building the launchable feature!
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Native mobile: The mobile team ended the year by getting our foundational infrastructure in place, including the runtime engine for rendering Bubble elements on mobile, the packaging system for preparing apps for the app store, and the ability to send over-the-air updates. Now they’re shifting over to work on the editor experience. Reminder: If you’re interested in early access, you can sign up for the waitlist at bubble.io/mobile.
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Styles tab refresh: This refresh will make it easier to sort and manage element styles and style variables in your app, and it will be one of the first things we ship this year! Keep your eyes peeled for it. Afterward, the working team will move over to redesigning the elements tree (part of our larger roadmap toward a modernized editor).
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Pageload performance: The team recently made some changes that help reduce unnecessary code sent to the web browser, which in turn helps to unlock pageload speed improvements. But we’re not done, and further improvements will be coming!
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Ecosystem improvements: The team continues to work on improving the RFP process, plus our template and plugin marketplaces.
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Stripe plugin: Our team is working on updating the Stripe plugin to take advantage of the benefits that come from some changes Stripe is making. (If you’re using the plugin, you’ll get an email from Stripe this month detailing those changes — none of which will affect or break your app’s functionality.) Stay tuned for more updates soon!
From the Bubble Blog
In case you missed it, check out:
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Resources to help you hit all your Bubble New Year’s resolutions
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And two great interviews with:
Team updates
We welcomed one new team member in December: Seve, joining us as a senior product analyst! And yes, we’re still hiring — we currently have six open roles across engineering, product, marketing, and sales.
Here’s to a great January ahead!
— Josh and Emmanuel
