Allen here. I’m covering the monthly community update while Josh is out on parental leave — you can check out July’s update from me here.
This is a busy month for Bubble. BubbleCon 2024 is less than a month away, and we’re all systems go. It’s a chance to get the first look at upcoming releases — like native mobile and AI — and meet your fellow Bubblers in person. Get your tickets here if you haven’t already!
There’s still time to nominate community members for the BubbleCon Community Awards. Categories include Developer of the Year, Best Use of AI, and many more. Nominations close September 10 and we’ll announce the winners on day two of BubbleCon.
A couple of other reminders before we dive into the other updates:
Join us fortomorrow’s AI webinar: Learn more about building an AI-integrated app on Bubble tomorrow, September 4 at 12 PM ET. Product Manager Grace Hong will walk you through features that allow Bubblers to easily connect to LLMs and quickly build and deploy AI apps. Then, we’ll talk to Bubble Ambassador George Collier about the AI-powered SaaS app he built that’s used by major EU construction companies to speed up their RFP processes by 80%. RSVP here to get a reminder notification.
Legacy plan migration: The legacy period for monthly capacity-based plans ends at midnight UTC onOctober 1 (8 PM ET, September 30). If your app is still on a legacy plan, you’ll get an in-app reminder. You can also use the plan migration tool to learn more. Monthly plans will be migrated automatically on October 1, and annual plans will be migrated at the end of their annual billing cycle…
Plugin data disclosure: As of August 31, all plugins in the Bubble marketplace are required to disclose if and how they use customer data. Plugins that weren’t updated by the deadline are at risk of being delisted. If you’re a plugin contributor, you should have received an email with more info on updating your plugins.
Now, on to the rest of the updates.
Everything that was released last month:
The State of No-Code: Thanks to input from hundreds of no-coders, we just launched the first State of No-Code report. It’s a deep dive into industry trends, funding insights, and AI’s impact. A highlight: More than 64% believe that by 2030, the majority of developers will be building with no-code. Give it a read.
PayPal marketplace payouts: Now marketplace contributors whose countries aren’t supported by Stripe can receive payments via PayPal. Stay tuned for more updates and documentation coming this week.
Workload tools:
New WU course: We worked with Gregory John and Petter Amlie to create three new videos all about workload — including best practices for tracking, monitoring, and optimizing workload usage. If you prefer to read rather than watch, check out all the workload resources in the manual.
App metrics improvements: Starting today, the pie chart will show how many times a given activity has occurred. For those newer to the app metrics tab, we also added links to the manual to help you understand how to interpret the charts [EDIT 9/3/24: We’re putting the finishing touches on this so the rollout will happen in a day or two] [EDIT 9/6/24: this is now rolled out!]
Read more about all of these updates on the forum and see below for what we’re working on next.
Changes to billing plan cancellation: Today, we’re releasing an improvement to the billing plan cancellation process. When you cancel your plan, your app will now remain active through the end of your current billing cycle. This means you’ll have access to your app, plugins, workload tier, and other add-ons until the billing cycle ends. Keep in mind that apps can still accrue workload charges through the end of the billing cycle unless you disable overages.
What we’re working on:
Reliability: The Scale team continues to focus on reliability. Right now, we’re working on user-facing improvements, like making deletes more reliable, and internal improvements, including better observability and allowing our build pipeline to react more quickly.
Platform performance: The implementation of LeanJS (as mentioned in last month’s post) continues. We’re in the middle of doing “brownouts” with plugin authors. The new code can interfere with certain things that plugins sometimes do, and this kind of testing helps shake out potential bugs before we roll it out fully.
Editor modernization:
Workflow tab: The new workflow tab is designed to improve user organization and make it easier to manage workflows. Make sure you join us at BubbleCon for updates on this project!
Menubar: The team is continuing their foundational work to reconfigure the menubar and left-side navigation, which will improve overall usability.
Workload tooling and app metrics: Soon, you’ll be able to see your total workload consumption over a time period, so you know how frequently an activity type is occurring.
Mobile:
We’re still making progress on our beta roadmap, and we’re excited to share more at BubbleCon. Thanks to our alpha testers for all their great feedback.
Right now, the team is working on swipe actions and multiple live versions. Next, we’ll be working on push notifications, reusable elements, and read-only offline support, as well as integrating camera and photo library access.
AI: We’re continuing usability testing on an AI tool that will generate more customizable outputs across design, data, and logic components and help users get further in their development process faster.
Roadmap reprioritization: We’ve made some adjustments to our roadmap through the end of the year based on team capacity:
We’re pausing the project for a new logs tab at the workflow run level in favor of more work on the reliability and performance of our core database infrastructure.
We’ve been working to implement SolidJS, which has the benefit of improving editor performance. As we’ve tested this, we’ve bumped into some gnarly bugs, so we’re assessing the additional effort needed relative to the benefits here.
We’re hosting a hackathon this weekend — sign up by September 6 to get more info on the prompt. We’ll be announcing the winners at BubbleCon. In the meantime, read what Aanya Shah, one of last year’s winners, has been up to.
Woops, these two paragraphs got lost in the copy + paste and have been re-added to the original post. Sorry about that! @SumitC Thanks for your question, it’s what led me to realize the content didn’t make it!
Will plugins be manually reviewed to ensure the accuracy of those statements? What would stop someone from just lying about how they’re using data?
Cool, hopefully we get a separate “conditional expression composer” and “workflow composer.” You guys should try using a custom OpenAI assistant with all the contents of the Bubble manual for this. Actually it would be great if you guys could let us download the entire manual as a .pdf so we could do this ourselves.
On the subject of conditional expressions, is there any update on a reusable conditional expression editor, or being able to edit in the middle of an expression like the old beta composer? This is the single biggest quality of life change you could make. With regular code you can change several sections of same code with a simple Find & Replace. In Bubble it’s extremely cumbersome to edit expressions, especially longer ones.
Thanks for the comprehensive update! It’s great to see all the exciting developments and the upcoming BubbleCon 2024. I’m particularly looking forward to the native mobile and AI features—those are going to be game-changers.
I appreciate the heads-up on the legacy plan migration and the plugin data disclosure requirements. I’ll make sure to review my plugins and prepare for the transition.
The new updates sound fantastic, especially the improvements to app metrics and workload tools. I’m eager to explore the new workload videos and see how they can enhance our usage tracking.
The focus on reliability and performance is crucial, and I’m glad to hear about the strides being made with LeanJS and editor modernization. Can’t wait to see these changes in action!
Thanks again for the update, and I’ll definitely be attending BubbleCon. Looking forward to meeting the team and fellow Bubblers!
Thanks for the detailed update! It’s exciting to see Bubble’s ongoing commitment to improvement. The focus on reliability and performance is definitely appreciated, as a solid foundation is crucial for any platform.
I’m particularly intrigued by the upcoming editor modernization and native mobile features. They seem promising in terms of enhancing the overall user experience.
However, I also wanted to share some thoughts on areas where I believe there’s still room for significant enhancement:
Branch Management : A more robust branch management system, similar to Git, would be a game-changer. The ability to clearly see changes when merging branches and releasing to Live would streamline collaboration and reduce the risk of unintended consequences.
Database Interactions and Search : While the AI page generator is interesting, I feel that improving database interactions and search capabilities should be a higher priority. More complex server-side searches and easier ways to work with the database would greatly benefit many Bubble developers.
Plugin Development : Enhancing the plugin editor and providing comprehensive documentation on the Bubble SDK would empower more developers to create and contribute plugins, further enriching the Bubble ecosystem.
Performance and SEO : Addressing performance bottlenecks, especially when running multiple scripts, and improving SEO capabilities would be invaluable for Bubble apps in the real world.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on these points, Allen. Are any of these areas on Bubble’s radar for future updates? Also, I’d love to know if there are any plans to address the current limitations in plugin development and SEO optimization.
Thanks again for keeping the community informed! Looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Bubble!
Just a note on plugins - this seems bad for paid plugins. Currently, plug-in subscriptions are prorated so you can subscribe for one day to try it out then unsubscribe if it doesn’t work. Now, it looks like we’d have to pay an entire month just to try it? This update doesn’t seem good unless Bubble adds a ‘free trial’ or ‘free in dev mode’ button. It will disincentivise trying paid plugins to identify the best.
The only area for SEO improvement is for page load speed. As of now it’s possible to get 100% on lighthouse page test metrics for 3/4 the only one it is not possible is performance/speed metric, which best I’ve gotten is 70 on desktop.
I don’t follow. Nothing in the original post states that anything has changed with regard to plug-in subscriptions.
As I understand, the change pertains to app (not plug-in) subscriptions and insures that customers continue to have access to features and services for which they’ve already paid.
Push notifications, camera, and photo library are up next?
These seem like features that would have been done prior to the announcement at last years BubbleCon.
I know nothing about building native mobile. I’m just starting to feel like I was a bit too optimistic about the native mobile announcement in 2023, which promised a beta to build an app and export to app stores in mid-2024.
I’m rooting for the bubble team on this. I need you.
It would be neat to be able to choose to:
