Hi all,
This is our March community update. You can read last month’s update here. Sorry this is a couple days late, I was out sick last Friday!
Anyway, there are a number of updates, so let’s dive in. First off, we launched Bubble’s new Community Hub. This is something I am personally really excited by: BubbleCon last year was amazing, and this is a way of keeping that energy going all year round. The hub is designed to be a home base to help you connect with other users and find events online and in-person. I can’t wait for you all to check it out. Make sure to bookmark it, since we’ll be updating it often.
Also, we were honored to be named a top development product in G2’s 2024 Best Software Awards! This award is based on authentic reviews from real users, so thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support: as usual, Bubble’s success and progress is fueled by the intensely passionate community we have.
Changes we made this month
We just launched the brand-new Hire a Developer portal, previously known as the RFP portal. We heard feedback from users that the volume of bids was overwhelming, and from devs that match quality was poor. The new portal now includes more and better details, as well as a new matching system. This allows users to send requests to 3–5 of their best-fit agencies based on criteria like services offered, team size, budget, and more. If you’re thinking about hiring an agency to help build your app, check out this new blog post on writing a great RFP.
The template marketplace also got a refresh. We rolled out new categories for templates, including AI, SaaS, Chat, Real Estate, Booking, Finance, and Mobile. We added more sorting and clearer filters: most installed, highest rated, price, newest, and oldest. (If you’re a creator, you can update your templates to new categories anytime from your home page.)
Last week, we wrapped up a two-day sprint in which our engineering team released more than two dozen small but meaningful “quality of life” improvements to the editor! These were based on feedback from some of our most avid Bubble devs and include unlimited style variables, more customization for magic links, and speed enhancements to the property editor. While we did the building over two days, there was a lot of advanced preparation that went into identifying the changes to be made and scouting out all the design and technical challenges we’d need to solve, so kudos to the team on the hard work! We consider the push a big success, and hope to do more of these in the future.
Another change along those lines: Privacy rules can now appear as results for app searches on data sources, data fields, and options.
We also shipped a new app plan comparison page that does a better job highlighting the key differences between our paid plans, so you can find the right subscription for your apps. Find it in the Settings tab!
Finally, you can now type “bubble.new” into your browser’s address bar as a shortcut to create a new app! This is especially useful for our agencies and avid Bubble devs who regularly launch new projects.
What we’re working on
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Mobile: The engineering team has wrapped up the technical foundations needed to render mobile apps, and the mobile editor experience is well under way. We’re looking to have all the basic mobile elements in place by the end of March! Don’t forget to sign up for the waitlist if you haven’t yet.
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Plugin discoverability: Now that we’ve taken a pass on templates, we’re now working on the plugins marketplace. We have plans to create better listing and sorting to make it easier to find the right plugin for your app. This update will focus mainly on Plugins | Bubble, but we do intend to also make the plugins tab a better experience as well (after we make our way through the workflow and other tabs).
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Refreshing the elements tree: This feature is now in private beta, and we’re excited to make it generally available soon.
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AI: We’re wrapping up usability testing, and we’re now in the process of internal QA. The team is ahead of schedule, so the private alpha will likely start this month!
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Version control changelog: Engineering work has begun on exposing a changelog in the editor. We heard from you that it’s critical to have visibility into the who-what-when of changes made in your app’s branches, so this feature is a priority for us.
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Updating the Stripe plugin: Keep your eyes peeled for an updated Stripe plugin that will make authenticating with Stripe easier and faster. No more copy-and-pasting API keys back and forth.
Further down the roadmap
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Template pricing caps: We heard your feedback on template pricing caps. We’re currently considering new ways to improve the overall quality of templates in our marketplace.
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Long-term updates: Stay tuned for updates to workflow tab redesign and an expanded component library. We’re in the designing and planning stages with this work, and will pick it up in earnest as engineering teams roll off other projects.
Important reminders
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Agencies and freelancers: Make sure to fill out your agency profile if you haven’t done so yet (we’ll be requiring it soon)! This will help you get the best matches through our new RFP portal. If you’re a developer who is building for others and wants the power of unlimited production-grade development apps, now’s the best time to sign up for an Agency plan.
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Final friendly reminder to update your third-party plugins 19 by March 12, 2024 (we’ve sent out email reminders to those affected). After that date, we’re going to start phasing out deprecated plugins to help minimize the impact on user apps as they lose functionality. If you don’t update, your app’s functionality may change or break.
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Certified Devs: You can now add a badge to your profile on the forum! Check out your profile and show off your certified status by marking it as your favorite badge
In case you missed it
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Prototypes are dead. Read all about it here.
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Agencies and freelancers: We published a blog post that details some recent search and usage trends across the marketplace and RFP portal with the hopes that it will help you earn more revenue. Check it out!
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How to Build Day is on Wednesday. It’s designed for people who are relatively early in their Bubble journey: those who are looking to either get from zero to launch, or to take their app building skills to the next level. Please share the registration link with any folks you know who might be interested in attending.
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More good reads and resources from the Bubble Blog:
Team news
We didn’t have any new hires join the team in February, but we’ve already got quite a few people slotted to start in March. Check out our open roles!
That’s all for this month. Have a great March!
— Josh and Emmanuel
