Monthly Community Update -- May 2025

Announcements
1

Hi everyone,

This is the May community update. You can read last month’s update here.

In case you missed it, we just wrapped up our stops in Rio and São Paulo for Web Summit Rio and Bubble Tour Brazil. Emmanuel and I always love meeting you in person, so thank you so much to all of our community members who attended. And congratulations to the Brazilian hackathon winners: Bianca Letícia da Silva, Luana Gero, and Ygor Andrade. Make sure to check out the winning apps!

Let’s get into the updates.

Everything we shipped last month

Most of the work on the mobile beta this month has been around stability and fixes in the lead-up to the launch in the next few weeks. Emmanuel announced in Brazil that this release is coming to everyone on June 10! Stay tuned for more info. Right now, we’re working on improving Android reliability and overall observability to help us troubleshoot bugs going into the public release. We’ve also shipped a few improvements to the beta, including the option to set a sheet as a reusable element and the ability to set a default value on selectable lists.

We launched support for API streaming! This allows you to use the API Connector to get real-time, word-by-word responses from services like ChatGPT. There are a ton of use cases beyond AI as well. Read more on the forum here.

AI app generation also got several updates, including more support for brand and styling traits. Now when you generate an app, you’ll see a more consistent look and feel across pages and more modern branding and coloring. You can read more on the forum here. Additionally, we’ve increased the prompt limit from 500 to 2,500 characters, which should give you much more room to describe the app you want to build. Try it out and let us know what you think!

We wrapped up work on query cancellation as part of our migration off a legacy stored procedure language. We’re expecting to be 100% off by the end of May, but we’re close enough to the finish line that we’re able to get one of the main benefits, which is canceling runaway queries. A lot of our database outages over the last year were caused by this issue, so this is a major step forward in the reliability of our database platform. These updates are part of larger platform stability work that we’re expecting to wrap up this month.

The updated workflow tab went out to all users last week. The goal of this update is to make organization and navigation more intuitive while setting up this part of the editor to better support highly requested future functionality like branching and looping. The latest version has improved search, including better visibility into conditions and which workflows actions belong to. This thread on X gives you a quick visual overview of the newest updates, and you can read the forum post here.

We’ve heard your feedback on this release, especially from developers managing large, complex apps, and we’re continuing to make improvements based on that feedback. We’re making a few adjustments for better visibility: Show conditional is now checked by default, and we’re working on starting with all folders expanded.

We acknowledge that there are tradeoffs to the new workflow editor vs the old one, especially for those of you who have invested in getting very fast with the old one, but we believe the new one better positions us for the long-term direction we want to take the editor in, both from a technical and UX perspective. We plan to continue building on top of the new direction, while listening to feedback and continuing to mitigate those tradeoffs as much as possible.

If you’re looking for tips on how to use the new workflow tab effectively, check out this YouTube video or community forum post.

We rolled out a new check in our security features that will help you detect if your Stripe API key is exposed. This is an issue that we’ve seen impact users from beginner to expert, and can mean you accidentally expose sensitive financial info. This is live now for all plans, and you can access it via the issues explorer tab on Flusk. You can also read our updated documentation for more details. Thanks to Bubble Ambassador @georgecollier for working with our team on this.

We also updated two security defaults in the editor to be more secure from the jump: Hide Swagger API will now be set to true, and Expose as a public API workflow will be set to false by default. These defaults will apply to all new apps and workflows, and should keep your APIs more protected with less manual configuration. You can read more on the forum here.

Lastly, all plans with access to premium changelog have updated data retention windows:

  • Growth: 14 days

  • Team: 20 days

  • Enterprise (Standard): 30 days

  • Enterprise (Dedicated): 1 year

  • Agency accounts: 20 days

This change gives you more flexibility (and visibility) to see changes in your apps. You should start to feel the impact of this change as we hit 20 days post-rollout.

What we’re working on

Mobile: Like I mentioned, we’re focused on launch prep, including working on final beta feedback and getting iOS and Android on par with one another. That work includes:

  • Supporting styles for new mobile elements like tab items and sheets
  • Supporting localization based on a device’s primary language via the App Text feature
  • Building a step-by-step debugger for mobile, similar to the debugger we have for web

We’re also aiming to release a feature that allows you to switch between mobile and web apps within your project. This should be available to mobile beta testers in early May.

AI: The next step towards our AI vision is taking all the AI functionality we’ve built for AI app generation and integrating it into the editor, so you can use it to iterate on apps as well as create them. We’re going to ship piece-by-piece, until anything you can do manually in the editor you can also do with AI. We’re starting simple: The first piece we want to integrate is using AI to create your database schema. Taking this smaller step first will allow us to move faster on future larger updates, and it addresses a place where we see new Bubble users often struggle. We’ll have more to share soon!

Security features: We’re also working on an automatic check to help enforce a Bubble best practice around API call security. This check would look for APIs being used as data calls that use private keys, but also use authentication method None or self-handled or OAuth2 User-Agent Flow. You can expect that soon.

ICYMI

  • Check out the app tour of Odyseek, a new series we’re doing on our YouTube channel where developers give an in-depth walk-through of their apps.

  • Watch BAM Tom build a remote workplace hub with Bubble AI and talk through the results.

  • We awarded $5,000 each to the winners of the Bubble AI Build Challenge. Congrats to Ayo Bami, Islombek Karimov, and Nailan Barbosa. Check out the winning apps here and scroll through all the entries using #BubbleAI on LinkedIn and X.

  • Read (or watch) the recap of our founder AI vision AMA.

  • Get ready to start building on mobile: We wrote a guide breaking down key differences between web and mobile development and spoke to beta testers to get their thoughts on how the two compare.

How to get involved

Lots of cool events happening in the Bubble community this month:

  • Say hi to other Bubblers attending No-Code Week Milano 2025 May 5–9.

  • Find A Dev Day is May 14. This is a fantastic opportunity for founders and developers to connect and find project opportunities.

  • Madrid Meetup is May 19, hosted by Bubble Ambassador Sonia T. This is a laid-back networking event for freelancers and agencies.

  • Create With 2025 is May 22 in the UK. This is a huge gathering of no-coders. Bubble Ambassador Tom W. will present on how to build autonomous AI agents on Bubble, and we’ll also have a few Bubble team members there in person. Make sure to say hi!

New team members

We had a bunch of new members join the team this month, particularly on our AI and Support teams! Welcome to:

  • Nisha, engineering manager
  • Cory, senior product manager (AI)
  • Anselm, senior software engineer (AI)
  • Dan, security and compliance manager
  • Jessie, technical success specialist
  • Shaima, Omesi, Melissa, Louis, and Nicole, technical product support specialists

That’s all for this month!

— Josh and Emmanuel

28 Likes
3

The new workflow editor has been great. I am especially looking forward to conditional branching.

1 Like
4

:grin:
Thanks for the update!

8 Likes
5

It’s really great to see bubble releasing features and enhancing the app, from stability, mobile, UI and security. This is a really good mix of a mature platform dealing with many competing priorities, from new users to advanced power users. Great job!

query cancellation

It’s help-a-founder-day. I’ve picked up a tip, try having a Counter and Max, then each time your workflow runs it can increment the counter until it hits max. That’s how we do it and it’ll save you unhappy WU bills :wink: :joy:

1 Like
6

I just got access to Native Mobile (via Freelancer). I’m impressed and everyone should be excited.

I’ve been pretty rough on bubble for delaying this so long, but I think it might be worth it.

I’m still messing around and finding limitations, but overall WOW!

3 Likes
7

I am happy about these updates. Making things more secure by default is a much better way of doing things.

This is a good thing too. :+1:

So glad to hear about this too. :blush:

These are the type of updates that I enjoy. Something useful and fixing issues.

Still not a fan of the AI app generation but splitting it out in smaller parts makes more sense. Please focus more on integrating smaller parts of it instead of the whole build an app part. It has been a pretty poor experience so far. It doesn’t come near what it needs to be to be useful. My clients keep coming to me thinking they have an app that is almost done and just needs a couple of hours to finish up. They don’t even realize how wrong they are.

Thanks for the updates! :blush:

3 Likes
8

Thank you for sharing that, it is amazing. Anybody struggling with the new workflow editor should check it out. Watch it at 1.5x the speed and take the 5 minutes to get a quick rundown on some ways to make the new workflow editor better than the old for you. I personally was not a fan of the change when it broke into my editor like the Kool Aid Man, but this video gives a great visual guide on how to leverage the features of the new editor. Thanks @romanmg for it, saved me a ton of playing around.

3 Likes
9

Great Updates!

Current updates and those coming reaffirm I made the right decision to build my apps on Bubble.

1 Like
10

Glad you found it helpful! And thanks for the mention, @josh! We’re excited about all these updates and what it means for future capabilities and growth :rocket:

4 Likes
11

Added a link in Josh’s post to this latest announcement:

12

@josh, thank you for acknowledging the challenges this release has introduced. While it’s appreciated that visibility improvements like defaulting “Show conditional” to checked are being made, such changes seem elementary and quick to implement. It’s concerning that more pressing issues persist:​

  • Persistent Bugs: Creating a new workflow within a folder still defaults it to the “Uncategorized” folder, disrupting organization.​
  • Quality of Life Issues: Within hours of release, community members created custom wrappers and browser extensions to restore basic navigability — highlighting that Bubble’s version lacks fundamental UX considerations that should have been in place before rollout. Why can’t Bubble follow the community’s lead and build these updates into the new WF tab?

These ongoing issues suggest a disconnect between the development team’s priorities and the immediate needs of users managing complex applications.​

"We believe the new one better positions us for the long-term direction we want to take the editor in…"​

" but we believe the new one better positions us for the long-term direction we want to take the editor in, "

While planning for long-term improvements like loops and branching is commendable, it’s unclear why the new workflow editor couldn’t remain optional until these features are less than a year away from implementation and the current issues are resolved. Forcing an underdeveloped tool upon users hampers productivity and erodes trust in the platform.

1 Like
13

are there any plans on allowing existing bubble apps to use plugins on native mobile?

not having access to the plugins I currently use would literally be a death knell for my mobile app which was wrapped 3rd party.

1 Like
14

It’s not possible if they wanted to. Wrapped apps have entirely different architectures to native apps.

1 Like
15

is there any movement on restoring the old workflow editor? It just seems surprising that there’s been such a heavy pushback, and the team has acknowledged the pushback, but won’t offer alternatives.

for a company that allows other companies to make $$$ it just seems sorta baffling that long time paying customers are being told to “just deal with it”.

cheers

16

I see. not sure how I feel about that. seems like bubble is investing a bunch of time into future customers as opposed to existing ones.

honestly not sure how I can interact with the native architecture without having to rebuild, which is out of the question.

would then need to be reliant on bubble to replace the functionality of all the deprecated plugins which just doesn’t seem possible, e.g provide a native implementation for Typesense Searching

17

The plugin marketplace exists for native mobile. There are already dozens of mobile native plugins. They’re not not the same ones as you can use on web.

18

I’d be interested to see what kind of mobile plugins are being developed, and how hard it’ll be for existing plugin creators to recreate their functionality within a mobile environment.

I’d also hope that there’s some sort of incentive.

i’m not sure if you’ve noticed but many many many bubble plugins will redirect to a “this used to be a bubble app” or “this apps plan does not support a live-version”

i find it extremely weird how plugin developers have to pay for monthly subscriptions just to showcase their plugins.

19

Converting plugins shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just adapting to Bubble’s methods.

20

Is there any insight into the pricing strategy for mobile? Are these included as part of a normal plan subscription or will there be an add-on? Will pricing go live on 10th June as I assume this is when Bubble Mobile goes public out of beta.

I think communication on these points ahead of time would be a positive thing to do in setting expectations and helping the community understand any additional costs when building out projects for themselves / clients.

2 Likes