Bubble Team, a plea from a long-time frustrated user - please start speaking to your users about the problems we want fixed!
There are lots of small issues that would rapidly speed up development and reduce the amount of clicks to build new apps that you could be focusing energy on, rather than shipping mostly useless updates that are not in the 80/20 of making the product better.
A few examples below:
The default text sizing
When you create a new textbox it is always fixed width 200, height 45. No one ever needs text like that. It requires 3 clicks to uncheck those boxes and remove the 200 width setting. Have the default to be fit width to content, fit height to content (or maybe a way you can set what you want the default settings for new elements to be across your app…?)
The default group “responsiveness setting”
Everyone should have moved to the new responsive engine. Why is it that whenever a new page or repeating group is created the default setting is fixed?
The duplicate style default
You used to be able to duplicate a text style and it would maintain the previous style’s settings. No longer. It always defaults to font size 14 and a random text colour (not even the text colour from the styles). Again, so many unnecessary clicks go into changing these defaults, where if the previous style’s settings had maintained, it would often likely just be one click to change the single setting you want.
SEO improvements
One of the most common apps built on bubble is marketplaces. Often, they want to grow via SEO. SEO on Bubble is shocking. I’ve raised previous concerns with either no response, or a limited unhelpful response, from the Bubble team about how these issues are being resolved. Put some energy into default SEO settings that make Bubble apps easily indexable and crawlable!
Arrange Elements in a …
When you group elements in a responsive container, you used to be shown the container sizing controls panel by default. Now, it goes to an “apply changes to elements” panel, which is almost entirely useless, given that most people apply containers to elements so that they can arrange them in a certain way. I now need to click around multiple times to get back to the container sizing page.
Working with Lists
One of the biggest limitations of Bubble is its (in)ability to properly handle large amounts of data in the backend. Lists - I’m looking at you. I’ve found myself more and more viewing Bubble as just the front-end for an app that is either powered by a separate database with API’s in, or another tool like Xano. It would be fantastic if some attention was given to improving Bubble’s ability to handle large amounts of data.
Shortcuts
When you use Webflow, one of the most helpful features to speed up development is the CMD+E shortcut to bring up the “add element” search box. You can add a new element without clicking away from your main area of work. 5 simple shortcuts to add new specific elements without your hands or mouse moving far would be fantastic.
I’ll be adding to the list as I work and come across other frustrations.