Hi everyone,
This is the September community update. You can read last month’s update here.
We’re focused on two things right now. The first is bringing Bubble fully into the age of AI by making sure our Agent consistently delivers the magic that users of tools like Claude Code are accustomed to, and by opening the platform up to every agent through an MCP interface.
The second is making sure our users who’ve built real, scaling businesses on us are successful by tackling longstanding issues with editor performance, version control, and reliability, as well as investing in the core Bubble language (new workflow engine coming soon!). We have a lot of work to do on both fronts, but I can tell you that our team is shipping faster than any time in the last ten years, and that there are some big moments ahead of us. On a related note, I’m excited by our recent Innovation Labs launch — we’ve found that it’s increasingly easy to test new ideas and products out very quickly, and want to take advantage of that by constantly coming up with new ways to help our users succeed.
What we shipped this month
You can now drop a pre-formatted Sign in with Apple button on any mobile app page and Bubble takes care of OAuth and credentials. This will make set-up faster for you as a dev and also helps meet Apple’s App Store requirements for sign-in. We’ve also introduced universal links for mobile apps. These solve the limitations of deep links (which don’t have a fallback if a user doesn’t have your mobile app installed), and can be placed in email, text, and social messaging to properly route users. You can read more about both of these updates on the forum here.
Last month, I shared new and updated capabilities for operators, including :index of and :toggle item. The team has been working on a few more of these:
- :converted to date transforms text or other values into a proper date format directly within expressions.
- The “formatted as” operator for boolean values makes it easier to display true/false data in a readable, customized format within your app (data types, option sets, etc).
New pages now default to responsive layout, not fixed, when your current page is responsive. This is a smaller default update, but it saves you a click!
The team has also dedicated a significant amount of engineering time on scaling and reliability work. These are especially useful to apps on dedicated and Enterprise plans, but they will also make an impact for any apps on larger plans, like Team and Growth, as well as any apps with multiple collaborators. Here’s an overview of that work:
- Merge improvements: Merges no longer block other developers the way they used to, and are meaningfully faster (around 30% in testing). We’ve also fixed errors around non-conflicting merges and phantom conflicts.
- Editor improvements: We’ve made targeted fixes to how editor pages load and hold on to memory, meaning faster page loads and reduced memory usage in your browser.
- Enterprise Hub: Specifically for dedicated environments, this new dashboard gives you a place to see status, uptime, infra health, and page usage.
- Read replicas: This update gives you a mirror database to run analytics queries, reducing competition for resources on your live database. It’s currently in private beta, but we’re targeting full rollout to dedicated customers in the next month or so.
You can read more about those updates on the forum here or watch Emmanuel’s recent live demo session to see them in action.
Lastly, the team has been steadily improving and expanding Agent functionality. Some recent wins:
- The Agent can now read and write to your dev database, although only if you explicitly give it access. This capability does not currently extend to live database.
- You can set the Agent to auto-approve or always ask before making edits based on whether you want to give it full access or make changes with more oversight on your end.
- We’ve fine-tuned our own model for faster expression generation, which we’re currently testing with a small portion of users. We’re working working on workflow and component gen speed next.
- The Agent can now recommend and install real plugins directly, rather than just suggesting general plugin functionality.
- When you generate a mobile app from scratch, Bubble AI will also create workflows.
- The Agent can create and edit custom states for you.
Give it a try — we’re always looking for your feedback as you run into any edge cases or unexpected behavior.
For a full list of everything we’ve been shipping, including a longer list of minor updates and bug fixes, you can look at our releases page.
What we’re working on next
- Mobile plugin editor beta: Later this month we’re planning on enabling plugins built on third-party libraries (that is, plugins not built on React Native). This will give any dev the option to build mobile plugins to extend native mobile functionality. You can expect more from us very soon.
- Web preview simulator: Right now, previewing your mobile app on the web is closer to an approximation than a true preview. We’re making some upgrades to give you the ability to simulate a more accurate user experience across screen sizes (including tablet!). We’re targeting mid-September for that release.
- Bubble MCP: We’re building an MCP that will allow your external agents to build and edit your apps on Bubble. You’ll have flexibility on what agents and models to use, as well as what parts of your app they’ll have access to. We’ve heard from a lot of you that you’re looking forward to this feature. We’ll have more to share soon.
- Agent improvements: We want the edits the Agent makes to be as close to user intent as possible. Right now the team is focused on improving its performance on multi-turn and complex edits. In parallel, we are also focusing on accuracy and latency gains to generate workflows, expressions, and UI, so that the Agent builds functionality more reliably. We’re also working on giving it the ability to query logs,
- Workflow engine updates: The team is undertaking a significant overhaul of how the platform handles workflow logic, which will enable branching and looping. If you’re a regular reader of this update, this is likely a feature you’ve been looking forward to for a while. If you’re interested in joining the alpha, let us know! We’re planning to open it up later this month.
ICYMI
- Emmanuel hosted his monthly livestream and demoed the new operators, scaling work, and answered your questions. You can read (or watch) the recap here. Registration for next month’s session is coming soon!
- Emmelie from the Marketing team hosted a fireside chat with the founder of thoughtbot. A great watch for any builders who are on the fence about launching. Check it out here.
New hires
We had several new hires join the team this month! Welcome to:
- Jake, senior product designer (mobile)
- Allen, senior software engineer (mobile)
- Agnes, senior product designer
- Jeremy, technical success manager
- Jake, senior success operations
We’re also hiring for a number of roles out of our NYC HQ right now, especially in engineering. Check those out here: bubble.io/careers.
That’s all for this month!
— Josh and Emmanuel
