Recently I feel that features like AI get so much attention from bubble but new features and redesigns like table and the elements tree get less. Or bugs / janky messes that have existed in the plugin editor (for literally longer than I’ve been on bubble) never get addressed, which are very hidden because not many users create plugins but they are so important because they limit the plugins that can be made and thus limit what’s possible on bubble.
It’s not an accident so many bubble apps have connections to AWS because bubble fails to meet expectations …
Service level agreement. Without that, all it shows is that YOU do not believe that Bubble can meet the expectations of its developers. Put your money where your mouth is. COMMIT to improving both run-mode and editor availability. I don’t care how low the SLA is - at least it proves you actually have a publicly available target that you are incentivised to meet.
It’s been 6 months since the team said this:
What’s changed? Very little (except that communication during incidents is now moderately better, so thanks for that and credit where it’s due).
I’m very much the type that will avoid external backends unless I really can’t help it, because the value of Bubble is in its frontend/logic/DB integration. But, if Bubble can’t pull itself together, WeWeb + Xano/Supabase will absolutely crush it for me, and I’m already trying to explore WeWeb more in the last couple of months purely because I’m not convinced Bubble could ever pull itself out of the mountain of tech debt it’s under and reliably compete with any new/open source/rapidly growing competitor.
I don’t really care how the community is integrated. Any communication need not be formal. For all I care, post a poll with a list of QoL improvements or bug fixes, and let us tell you which are most important. It costs you nothing, but not listening costs you our revenue and our client’s revenue.
^^^ THIS
weweb has actually been a lot of fun to learn and although has its own irritations they are far more in our control than anything with bubble.
I’d rather stay here but since the pricing roll out slaughter and seemingly endless bugs in the WU system we are being shown that half ass roll outs are the new standard here.
How can it ever take 7+ seconds to open a right-click context menu to paste or remove an expression, after clearing caches just a couple of minutes ago? I mean come on, it’s hardly an edge case, we’re pasting all the time
Here’s another (and how was this not caught in testing??), I can’t select the text to rename it…
And this one, I’m always messing with RE properties but the new elements tree means I can’t open the root element unless I click another element first:
Why doesn’t clicking a hidden element unhide it until I deselect it so I don’t have to keep toggling the visibility of every element I touch?
Also, for the love of god, stop automatically setting every group created from merging two or more groups together to 60px min. height. For an entirely new group, fine, but not for two existing groups. It’s so annoying having to constantly remove it particularly when it’s not always obvious at first instance.
Oh, surprise surprise, WU logs still aren’t fit for purpose:
Why did ‘reveal elements in tree’ disappear from the context menu?
Why did you change the schedule API workflow on a list action speed such that race conditions now affect essentially any API workflow that operates on a list? It would’ve been so simple to set all of the existing ‘automatically schedule’ / empty intervals to 1 second or 2 second, but nope, let’s fire off 20 per second, which is great in principle, but not when Bubble doesn’t protect against race conditions and deploys this straight to live apps!
Deal with stuff like this, and you’ll build community trust.
To be honest, WU is what bothers me the least about Bubble right now. I don’t even like WU - it just shows how downhill the reliability and editor experience has been going
I can always price in WU to my SAAS companies or guide clients on how to structure their pricing based on WU usage to stay profitable. What I can’t do is explain downtime to my SAAS customers or clients when their site keeps crashing when they are on “reliable AWS servers” multiple times per week.
Leave aside for a moment, the inability to prioritize substantive changes that are important to the builders that matter over bells and whistles features and tone deaf understanding of what the issues in the current version are. (e.g., weeks after the editor changes → " We’re working hard to improve our product, including a [total overhaul of the editor ]").
@TipLister, Yes, Bubble has an excellent community. However, the solution is not to rely on them even more. Bubble has already enlisted the community as its defacto QA team.
IMHO, the basic issue boils down to this: Bubble appears to have far too much tech debt (as @georgecollier correctly reminds us), they appear to be unable to focus on a business model or roadmap (from the outside looking in), and, most importantly, Bubble’s execution of its rollouts is atrocious:(.@heythere and therefore, even if Bubble if incorporating user feedback into the roadmap, they still need to do a way better job of rolling it out.
For example, it is unacceptable to release editor changes without user input, but it is far worse to fail to notify users in advance about the changes. To top it all off, like EVERY major release since the beginning of 2023, and like most Beyoncé songs, the release came out of nowhere and unexpectedly, and Bubble was caught off guard! (for example, “You should not be seeing that field just yet.”)
Users who find the new changes to be a disaster do not bother with the arduous bug filing process because we are still unsure whether the issues we are experiencing are bugs or intended behavior.
Another example: The editor has been causing me major problems, and often, when I click somewhere in the editor, it lags and then deletes the group I clicked on. It is annoying, but it is fixable with ctrl z. Earlier this week, the content of an SPA page was completely deleted, including a major reusable group that within the content group (the reusable itself was deleted from the app!)! I was about to file another bug report, but I decided it was not worth the stress and the inevitable consequences, so I spent a few hours rebuilding it. It’s really unfortunate that we’ve reached such a state of hopelessness.
@georgecollier It’s a 3 way race for which resolution will come first:
Bubble will fail and release its source code
Bubble will right the ship and return to its glory days of delivering a great product to its users
AI will eliminate the entire no-code/low-code industry (it’s only a matter of time and can’t be more than~3 years away).
At this point, the race is way too close to call (as far as I can tell). You have any favorite to bet on?
@bestbubbledev totally. It feels very similar to when I was at WeWork in 2019… (I am one of the people here old enough to remember when it was considered a unicorn 45X over!). There are many similarities, particularly in its members’ behaviors and preferred beverages.
Traditionally I’ve never had many complaints about downtime, but the last few have been pretty embarrassing answering my phone and saying “yeah, bubble’s down” and hearing my client scream to all her employees in the background “BUBBLE’S DOWN AGAIN”. Really Makes me question everything I’ve done.
However this last outage was the straw that broke the camels back for my largest client. I answered the phone and sat through roughly 5 minutes of expletives hurled at me at max volume. I was called everything but a man, and all I could do was apologize and offer absolutely no solutions since it was out of my hands. They are going through a large expansion right now, and I imagine the last few incidents has them shopping around for a replacement during the transition. Can’t say that I blame them either.
But hey, soon we’ll have the ability to not connect from a mobile app too.
And they can’t even tell me if it will work offline. I understand that maybe it won’t. But they they don’t know is what gets me. Do they not have an end in mind when they start building?
I had similar to this recently, mid-size company looking to move all their internal systems to bubble and wanted to start with a single project to get a feel for the viability. They ended up scrapping the project after a few months because these issues, atop a serious lack of customer support regarding bugs were too much, they just lost faith in the platform, it’s a shame because they started off super excited about it.
Part of me thinks Bubble might be trying to ship too many different things and stuff is coming out half-baked. They’re already ahead of the competition in terms of what you can achieve with the platform, if core requirements like uptime and good customer service/bug assistance start slipping further, and people lose faith in its viability, then no one is going to care about much of these new features.
It seems pretty evident though they’re not listening to users much, or at least only a tiny sliver of certain users. For example I’m on an agency plan and the recent agency tier changes are crazy, they’re practically written to keep already large agencies on top at the expense of the ‘bronze’ and 'silver’s.
I’ve been here 8 years and have seen a few ‘waves’ of issues that have led to power users leaving. It has always left a void in the community which eventually gets filled, but it is always a net negative for the community in the end. I’m worried that another one could be coming with this instability combined with legacy pricing deadline.
Bubble has a great team doing solid work, but like it’s mentioned here there is far too often a lack of improving features and updates after they are launched.
Also the focus on helping agencies sell new apps will help short term sales, but I have to think that with these instability issues and a lack of focusing on the power user experience, that the churn rate could become very high. These agencies often produce MVPs, prototypes or non-critical internal tools, that then the customers either stop pursuing the idea or build it in traditional code for more stability and to access a larger hiring pool that can actually manage it after the build. This unfortunately keeps up the cycle of building hype features to quickly get more customers in the door, but it doesn’t fix the leaky end of the bucket of power users/apps.
As I mentioned, I have seen this before and I know the Bubble team can right the ship, I just hope it’s soon!
Seems like Old and New users are a bit frustrated at the moment.
I think Bubble would be better off not bothering with updating the UI of the editor, or Bubble pages and they would be better off focusing on improving performance. If our apps were faster and could achieve a 90+ score on Google Page Insights for performance, I think then Bubble would be able to maintain their existing client base, and bring in more new clients that were ‘on the fence’ about Bubble as well as new users who just learned about it…After performance is no longer an issue, yeah Bubble, go balls to the walls on updating how pretty things look.
Totally agree , I believe focusing on agencies is a short-term solution , the better the product means not better the UI but better the tools . SEO , Performance , built-in pickers , better built-in maps , working group focus .When the users are able to do that without single custom css or a code than that means more agencies , cheaper , faster . We are wondering whether we will get good performance yet need to write a code to make group focus element fit the parent groups width or need css or a plugin for date picker , or sliders to be usable in complex cases . I imagine a Bubble where whenever new user types ‘‘what is pagination ?’’ , already existent tools inside editor appears , a scrolling page to load , js tool etc… I mean a new user can’t optimize images for modern serve for webp natively. (without complex additional steps) .
Good words, Bubble is really an amazing company.
You were direct and I believe you represent the thinking of many real entrepreneurs who need security to move their business forward (without panic of surprises).
I would just respectfully speaking add about “Bubble sitting down with advanced users to talk”.
In fact, Bubble already does!. But, unfortunately, they bring “Bubble digital influencers” to the table, people who “carry Bubble’s image and everything it does”. And that’s great, for this purpose, just. But they don’t the same concerns that software companies have.
And also, about BUbbe have to have listen more carefully to customers from other countries.
Topics such as numerical notations ( comma or dots places) that should not be left behind.
In my editor, when I click on the element, it’s automatically revealed in the element tree.
I love the editor redesign. It’s easy to drop elements direct from the library into the element tree where you want it. It’s less finicky to drag things around in the element tree and even the eye icon is easy to click and see.
Still slows down after a while, but not needing to have surgical precision to click on things is nice.
I can always price in WU to my SAAS companies or guide clients on how to structure their pricing based on WU usage to stay profitable. What I can’t do is explain downtime to my SAAS customers or clients when their site keeps crashing when they are on “reliable AWS servers” multiple times per week.