Monthly Community Update - July 2024

Announcements
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Hi all!

If you don’t know me, I’m Allen. I’ve worked with Josh for five years and today I’m VP of Product at Bubble. As Josh is heading out on parental leave (congrats Josh!), I’ll be taking over his monthly community update. You can read the June community update here.

What does my job entail? Part of my job is to work closely with Josh and the rest of Bubble leadership on our product strategy to bring us closer to our shared vision of making it so anyone can build software.

On the day-to-day level, I also lead our team of PMs, product designers, researchers, data specialists, and Bubble Developers, and work with cross-functional partners like the Marketing team to scope out, prioritize, and execute on our roadmap.

For this post, I’ll be aiming for the same level of technical detail as Josh’s usual posts. That being said, if you have feedback on this monthly post, the team and I would love to hear it!

As a quick heads up, the Bubble office will be closed July 4–5 for the holiday. We’ll still have coverage, but you might experience a delay in response times from Support.

Now, onto the updates!

What we shipped last month

New AI features: We recently launched two new AI features:

  • Build guides, a feature previously only available to new users are now available to everyone by popular request. After describing your app idea, you’ll receive a custom build guide with a suggested list of features, instructions on building them, and a step-by-step walk-through for building the app’s database (including data types and fields), first pages, and workflows.

  • (Beta) AI page designer, a feature that started out as an internal stepping stone toward a larger AI product we’re building. However, after positive feedback from community members, we decided to open the beta to everyone. It’s been really exciting to see how the community has used the tool ‌so far.

These features are primarily designed with new users in mind, so they can get started building on Bubble more quickly. But we also think they’re going to be helpful for more experienced devs so that they can spend less time on page design and more time programming. Watch the demo video or read more about these features on the forum.

Workload management: The team rolled out a series of tools to help you plan, track, and optimize workload usage as your app continues to scale:

  • Infinite recursion protection: Enable this feature to prevent unexpected WU consumption caused by runaway recursive workflows.

  • Custom workload notifications: Get an email if your app hits a WU threshold in a timeframe that you set.

  • Cost estimator: For new users considering Bubble, this tool can help estimate the monthly plan, workload units, and plugins you need for the first year.

  • New and improved articles in ‌the Bubble Manual: We re-organized the Manual and added new articles to help answer workload-related questions you might have, including advice on how to optimize the workload usage for an existing app

Read more about these new tools (and the team’s plan for related upcoming features) on the blog.

Updates to Agency plans: Agency users can now access bulk data operations in their apps. We also instituted two-factor authentication to increase security while working on apps for clients, and allowed you to specify developer or non-developer team roles to help with certification tiering requirements.

More customization for the button element: Buttons now support icons and text! This update comes with six new icon libraries as well as an update to the default library. You can now choose from:

  • ​​Material UI Icons (the new default)

  • Phosphor

  • Bootstrap

  • Ionic

  • Font Awesome v6 (free)

  • Feather

  • Font Awesome v4 (the original for existing apps)

Read more on the forum. This is a fun and useful quality-of-life improvement on Bubble — we know users had to employ workarounds to achieve this common UI pattern, but now it’s much easier to do.

New app privacy options: We’ve rolled out improved data privacy options for your Bubble app. You can set permissions (ranging from no permission to view and edit) that will let you dictate when and how the Bubble team can troubleshoot your app. Learn more in the manual.

What we’re working on

This is what’s in flight right now, but stay tuned for a longer-term look at our roadmap for Q3 and beyond coming from me soon.

Stability: If you’ve been keeping up with Josh’s stability updates, we’ve made a lot of progress on our platform stability work. The team has moved from short-term fixes to medium-term projects. For more details on what that entails, you can read Josh’s update from June 14.

Mobile: Nick, the PM for the Mobile team, just shared a sneak peek of the roadmap and timeline for the native mobile beta. We hope this update will help you plan your own development timelines. The tl;dr of his post: We’re now aiming to invite users to join the private beta at the start of Q4. With Bubble’s native mobile editor, you’ll be able to:

  • Build fully native apps for iOS and Android

  • Integrate with mobile device functionality

  • ​​Test and deploy your mobile app with new preview and publishing experiences

AI: Build guides and the page designer tool are just the start of Bubble’s investment in AI — we believe that AI and no-code can synergize with each other to even further democratize software creation. Right now, the team is working on expanding our AI’s ability to help founders get to a prototype more quickly so they can validate their ideas sooner. This will help accelerate them through the learning curve of other areas of Bubble, including expressions. We’ve also made some exciting progress on letting AI generate designs not just using templates, but also by creating custom components. On top of that, we’re adding backend functionality to AI-designed pages.

Legacy plan migration tool: If your existing app is on a legacy plan, we’ll be launching a tool to help you choose the best new workload-based plan for your app. It will also help you determine if, based on your app’s WU consumption, you should purchase a workload subscription for a discounted rate or pay as you go by enabling workload overages. As a reminder, the 18-month legacy period ends on October 1, 2024.

Editor improvements: The team is starting on a major revamp of the workflow tab to make it easier to manage large amounts of workflows. We’re also working on a UX + UI revamp of the menubar — the strip at the top of the editor — which is your portal for navigating between different pages, accessing the deploy flow, using certain tools, and more. We’ll be picking up Version Control changelog work later in Q3 now that we’ve made some reliability improvements to the underlying infrastructure that powers that feature. Changelog lets you view all changes made on a branch, including who made the change and when, which should really help teams collaborate more smoothly on a Bubble app.

Finally, you might remember that the engineering team got together to release more than two dozen “quality of life improvements” earlier this year. We’re gearing up for another push on this in July. Stay tuned for more information about what the team is planning to tackle!

Updates from the Content and Community teams

How to get involved with Bubble

The Community team is excited to announce our new Bubble Ambassadors program! These users organize meetups around the world, help the Community team moderate the forum, and manage online groups and communities. Look out for their official intro on the Community Hub in the coming weeks.

ICYMI

  • BubbleCon tickets are on sale now! Register here to attend virtually or in NYC.

  • Gregory John has a new AI course that you can watch on the Bubble YouTube channel.

  • We also recently featured Fede, our new ​​manager of community operations and moderation, on the blog.

  • We’re launching a new partnership with Contra to help Bubble-Certified Developers grow their client base. Learn how to apply here.

  • Bubble is now on TikTok!

Team updates

Four new folks joined the team this month! Welcome to:

  • Rutvij, product marketing manager

  • Ariana, software engineer

  • Andy, engineering manager

  • Sarah, account manager

Thanks all for tuning in and for being part of the Bubble community! Hope you have a great July.

— Allen

37 Likes
2

Thanks Allen,

A lot of positives this month.

Infinite recursion protection :white_check_mark:
Custom workload notifications :white_check_mark:
More customization for the button element: :white_check_mark:
New app privacy options: :white_check_mark:
(Editor Speed Update) :white_check_mark:
(Stability Overall.) :white_check_mark:

Thx!

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I double this : a lot of positive this month.

Especially about the stability. No major outage in almost a month :+1: :+1:

And this is great that you are doing work on the builder side, meaning things that are usefull for us freelance & professionals and not only just shinny marketing bluff

Keep going :+1:

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4

A good month overall with lots of good smaller features. Thanks!

Please, please ask the users!

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That’s cool. I always use a text file and drop in the code. This makes it a bit easier now. Thanks.

Looking forward to this! :point_up_2:

Thanks for the updates @allenyang :blush:

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Updated icons - finally! And even button icons - great stuff!!

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@allenyang great update, thanks for stepping in.

I’ve mentioned this previously - but can you please consider adding scaffolding added to the roadmap. You can categorize the feature as “AI” if it helps.

The scaffold could generate input fields on a page for all fields of a Data Type OR it could start with a page that has form fields and add their respective database fields (with types based on the type of input). If you wanted to extend it further it could automatically add a repeating group for all fields in the data type.

This would save so much time for experienced users and make it easier for new users to learn the platform.

Thanks in advance for the consideration.

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Here is the corrected version of your message:

Good job on the platform stability! This last month was nothing short of a smooth experience. I really hope it will only get better.

Thanks for the update, Allen, and congrats to Josh.

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well done team!
many helpful changes that make life easier for both beginners as well as more advanced users
looking forward to more

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If it’s anything like that cost estimator you just dropped you can keep it

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Thanks for the update Allen. Great job!

regarding the update on button UI (something so small but sorely needed) we still don’t have the ability to show a loading state by default meaning we’ll have to use workarounds like groups. Please consider adding this to the QoL improvements.

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This is so useful :heartbeat: :heartbeat: @allenyang - For me, it’s big news. This helps a huge amount with security compliance.

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Please put up a post with a poll for the improvements that are being considered. This could be a better way for the community to voice what is more important as not all great ideas on the idea board are rated as high as they should be.

Please make it so all data sources when hovered show complete name. So often they are cut off and indiscernible from each other, especially some data returned by APIs. Like playing a guessing game when can not see full name.

5 Likes
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I have some

-wider inputs and editor panel
-highlight on hover over rows in the database designer
-wider inputs in the database designer, and option set area, and every area
-schedule a custom workflow in the backend area, or allow us to return data from an api workflow that’s called from the front end
-allow us to pass api connector data types in a scheduled backend workflow
-add same icons you did in the side panel element tree to everywhere else
-when you filter a level or 2 deep you lose the “This thing” from the 1st level. Would like to be able to consistently refer a few levels back

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Yep +1 to all these, quick wins for the editor

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Drag to resize arbitrary text input > mobile native :rofl:

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Hi @allenyang , Thank you for the update and I’m encouraged by the updates.

I would add to the vision that “and anyone can use the software that is built.”

I see there has been some movement in the editor to work towards the W3C’s Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). When can we see some movement in the rendered code to start toward meeting the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2?

Are we eventually going to get HTML5 elements?
Is Bubble going to stop using inline styles eventually?

Thank you

1 Like
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Just please quality life improvements do these ;

· Working groupfocus
· Functional Slider input with custom design
· Functional date/time picker
· New gen picture uploader
· Links that goes in the same page but doesn’t reload the page

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Last one can already be done, use go to page and on the drop down where you can select the page name, right down the bottom is current page

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No you can’t , I said without reloading the page