About 2 months back I got curious about Mobile and started checking it out casually. The learning curve is minimal and it shouldn’t take you more than a week to figure out pretty much all there is to know about Bubble Mobile.
I dropped off for about 4 weeks to focus on a client project and finally got back to it recently. While browsing the forum I discovered a Whatsapp group channel dedicated for Mobile devs (pretty much exclusively). Its pretty much a group where plugin devs market their products and answer potential client question because not too many custom solutions are available on the Mobile Editor at the moment.
Since I’m in between projects at the moment, I’ve been working on a passion project which I believed would see the best results if deployed natively. So I started building. As you can imagine I ran into a lot of road blocks particularly when trying to implement highly customized UI. My experience so far is that you either have to buy or build a plugin to confirm with UI requirements. A basic example of this is a slider. You cannot build an industry standard slider (carousel) with native elements today (or at least the last time I checked)
So, my initial reason for deciding on mobile native development was an assumption that user engagement would be better on a native app. Boy was I wrong!
Posted a survey on the Bubble Mobile Group to figure out if my assumption was well founded and these were the result. These results combined with the significant overhead costs of actually getting your app listed on an app store changed my mind about Bubble Mobile? … at least for now.
Am I a fool for doing so and why?
Yes very well founded, foundation of these results are so robust that Bubble should ditch native mobile.
What is this rage bait on bubble forum ?
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Definitely not rage bait. I’m just curious about peoples interpretation of the survey results.
One of the reasons I post this is because I’d love to stay on Bubble and not leave because I no longer believe in the long term vision. Bubble has a great first-to-product-market-fit advantage but they seem to be throwing it away.
I don’t know I’m hesitant to say this, but I’m of the opinion that Bubble should not be making multiple major product releases within a short timeframe, because none of them seem to get the attention they need.
I would like to see Bubble focus on mobile and fix the recurring issues and then start integrating ai on a complete product …. as an additional utility tool (not the point of focus). Mobile Beta is an essential product (or at least I thought so), the AI not so much (yet) in my opinion.
I think the results may be underwhelming, because what you can achieve at the moment with the mobile editor is rather underwhelming. I haven’t built a complete app with it yet (because I pivoted away as soon as I saw the results of the survey so I may be wrong).
Survey will need more than 15 responses to be worth anything…. If there were 1,500 responses that also included a report on what was done to promote their web version versus their mobile version to get an idea of why one out performed the other, then we could extrapolate and maybe get some insight. The survey also at the moment doesn’t express if the ‘devs’ who responded have both mobile and web versions of same product, which is essential to compare the two.
I agree with your thoughts on bubble taking on too much at once, but the concept of a tiny number of responses with no insight to the product etc. is not a valid result to make any kind of decision from.
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If you toss a coin 3 times, and all 3 of them are tails, is it 100% probability that you will get tails again ?
Law of large numbers aside, also it is a survey, a far far inferior data point.
It also wildly depends on the type of platform you’re building.
Some businesses need an app, some benefit from an app (perhaps a companion app), whilst for others it would be silly to build an app of any type.
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Why not ask bubble users?
From your experience, which delivers stronger user engagement … a native mobile app or a Web app?
- Native Mobile
- Web apps
- They are basically the same
- I haven’t compared the two
Usually, I upset people when I give my opinion on this…
But it’s based on experience and statistics.
Out of the nearly 5 million apps in the app stores, only about .05 to 1% are even able to break even. The top 200 to 300 apps get the most money.
So, I’ve always said, if you can’t build a web app and turn it into a PWA and be successful, you probably have about a zero percent chance of being successful in an app store.
Many things you need can be done with a PWA. If you’re building a game, that’s a different story, but hopefully you’ve got a ton of financing to back you up.
I’ve never understood the urgent need to get an app into an app store.
Just my thoughts. If anyone can convince me otherwise after my experiences in the app world, or the hard statistics out there, I would definitely listen to your side
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I respect the attempt @betteredbritain, even if the poll was small.
How about I post it next week with my X account and here, see if we can get more votes?
Thanks for the offer @fede.bubble but I think the survey we currently have on this thread should suffice.
Its obvious that some people have really strong feelings about this topic. If we can at least get 30 responses for devs who have compared the user engagement performances, we will have a sample size that complies with normal distribution and therefore have reliable data to work with.
I’ve personally made up my mind on this for the short term future, not necessarily because of the discussed survey but that data served as a reinforcing tool (although somewhat unreliable). I’ve seen far too many issues about mobile in general pre and post deployment on the forum. That said I’m not here to skew people’s opinions about this release, rather I’d really love to hear a more detailed version of the good and bad post deployment in particular.
Hopefully, if we have information from enough people the higher pricing for mobile will be reassessed should web deployments perform better than mobile.
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