What are your biggest pain points that slow you down in Bubble?💡

riverogonzalez.isaac · 2024-12-18T09:57:18.844Z

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring ideas to create tools or plugins that make Bubble development more efficient. Like many of you, I’ve faced challenges while working on my apps, and I know some tasks can feel repetitive, confusing, or just take longer than they should.

I’d love to know:

What are the biggest pain points you encounter while building in Bubble?
What tasks would you like to automate or simplify?
What would help you save time or improve the quality of your apps?

My goal is to build something that truly makes a difference for the Bubble community. Any feedback, ideas, or frustrations you share would be incredibly valuable to me!

Thank you in advance for sharing.

mitchbaylis · 2024-12-18T16:08:20.215Z

I love Bubble, and it’s honestly one of the best platforms for building apps without code. However, like any tool, it’s not perfect, and there are some pain points that I think many of us have experienced:

Copy-Paste Issues
Sometimes, copying and pasting elements just doesn’t work properly, which can disrupt your workflow and add unnecessary frustration.
Buggy Releases
Bubble’s continuous release cycle means new features and fixes, but it also means bugs—sometimes big ones—that can break existing workflows or introduce new issues.
Default Dates
When date fields are blank, they default to January 1, 1970, which isn’t exactly helpful. Extra work is needed to handle this quirk.
Search Function Problems
The search function in the editor works about 80% of the time. The other 20%? It inexplicably misses references, which makes debugging and editing harder than it should be.
Frequent Crashes
The platform itself crashes far too often, interrupting work and adding unnecessary stress.
Poor Documentation
The documentation feels lacking, especially for more advanced features. You often have to rely on trial and error—or the community forum—to figure things out.
Complex Plugin Development
Building plugins is way harder than it needs to be. The process is overly complicated and not beginner-friendly.
Security Defaults
The default security settings for backend workflows aren’t robust, which means you have to actively configure them to avoid vulnerabilities.
Limited Style Editor
The style editor is restrictive. For example, there’s no built-in option for a “disabled” state for elements, which should be standard.
Element Defaults
The default sizing on elements is often inconvenient and requires constant adjustments to get things looking right.
Intrusive Editor Popups
Popups and alerts in the editor—like the AI page builder notifications—are intrusive and get in the way of productivity.
Unresponsive Support
Bubble’s support team rarely resolves tickets efficiently. Tickets often get passed around with no clear resolution. For instance, I’ve had 7 tickets open in the last 4 weeks, and none of them have been resolved yet.

Delightful · 2024-12-18T16:18:30.042Z

Can you please stop using gpt to paste contents.

Screenshot_20241218-2140381080×2460 479 KB

Thanks,

Benjamin_Rodgers · 2024-12-18T16:32:47.942Z

I spend a lot of time naming groups and subgroups like:

Group User Main > Group User Body > Group User Header > Group User Name > User Name Caption > Group User Input Name > Input User Name

It gets pretty tedious, especially when copying similar elements and having to rename everything. A tool that uses AI to suggest or rename groups based on set parameters and apply it retroactively to groups and child elements would be super helpful.

hi.luisacosta · 2024-12-18T17:56:06.497Z

I would love this. A way to grab the parent and have it name the children etc along the way according to the context!

fede.bubble · 2024-12-18T20:45:30.080Z

Some good takes here, thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. I’ll share with the team

austin3 · 2024-12-18T21:02:55.786Z

Editor Performance - In my experience the app has gotten worse, not better, in the past year. I routinely have to wait up to several minutes for intensive tasks (such as branch-switching or merging) to load. I’m fairly certain this is due to the enormous memory usage of the editor and probably poor memory management.
Copy pasting, especifically expressions - As others have mentioned, copy-pasting is one of the most annoying things to deal with, especially across pages. bubble has certainly gotten BETTER at identifying commonalities such as states of the same name/type across pages, but recreating a flow across multiple pages or groups is still incredibly time-consuming. And when it comes to compound expressions, you almost always end up having to rewrite everything but the first part of the expression if any references are even slightly different.
Speaking of expressions, this is another area where I spend huge amounts of time. The current way of handling expressions (using the expression composer “beta” feature, which has been in beta for like 2 years and tbh should just be baseline at this point) is better than the dark days of not having any sort of order of operations control at all. Still, it leaves a lot to be desired. God forbid you have a complicated expression and need to change the source of data to something that isn’t a 1 to 1 replacement - you’ll often be rewriting quite a bit, especially if the expression consists of “nested” values such as do a search for or format as text
Speaking of searches, this is another pain point. Often I just want to copy the contents of a search operation to another search operation in a different expression, but instead I end up having to either rewrite the search manually or even worse, rewrite the whole expression. And while we’re at it, why can’t we change the order of the fields in a search (or a create a new thing or make changes to a thing action)? Often times I end up deleting and creating new fields for searches just to maintain a consistent order for readability. Why can’t we even change the field being searched for without creating a new one?

Not sure if any of the above can be fixed with third-party tools, but who knows.

ihsanzainal84 · 2024-12-19T06:37:26.541Z

Give me native versions of Classify and Toolbox features and I’m good to go.

We need to be able to write and apply our own CSS in elements.
We need to be able to write, run and extract values using Javascript in WFs and use those values in elements.

Bubble is great at what it does in bridging the gap in app development, but with how accessible AI is for coding now, custom scripts should be a part of the native experience. Heck I’d pay an additional subscription for an AI assisted Bubble in-editor IDE for scripting.

marpas · 2024-12-19T08:34:03.021Z

ihsanzainal84:

Give me native versions of Classify and Toolbox features and I’m good to go.

Exactly!

riverogonzalez.isaac · 2024-12-19T13:17:51.073Z

Thanks a lot for the comment!

For what I see in your comment and the one from @hi.luisacosta it is a pain. However I do’nt know if it is possible to do that as a third-party tool but maybe for the copied elements???

riverogonzalez.isaac · 2024-12-19T14:45:22.742Z

Thank you very much for your ideas!

I totally agree that the current way of handling expressions is a big pain but I’m afraid it is something that only bubble can fix. However there is one thing that keeps repeating itself… Copy and paste (expressions, groups…) is a pain

Thanks!!!

riverogonzalez.isaac · 2024-12-19T15:12:04.614Z

Hey there! Theanks for yous answer!

I hope I’m not asking anything stupid (might be the case) but what is IDE?..

And YES… We should be able to write our own CSS

Thanks!

hi.luisacosta · 2024-12-19T15:26:23.784Z

I think a Chrome Extension could do it

georgecollier · 2024-12-19T17:51:36.770Z

dropping this here https://faceoff.nqu.xyz/

CleanShot 2024-12-19 at 17.51.42@2x3024×1706 308 KB

CleanShot 2024-12-19 at 17.51.50@2x3014×1476 373 KB

bubble needing an ideaboard elo system is a hill i’m prepared to die on

georgecollier · 2024-12-19T17:53:54.043Z

ihsanzainal84:

We need to be able to write and apply our own CSS in elements.

Amen to this

austin3:

Speaking of searches, this is another pain point. Often I just want to copy the contents of a search operation to another search operation in a different expression, but instead I end up having to either rewrite the search manually or even worse, rewrite the whole expression.

And this

Benjamin_Rodgers:

Group User Main > Group User Body > Group User Header > Group User Name > User Name Caption > Group User Input Name > Input User Name

This doesn’t bother me, but if you wanted to build something yourself, it’s one that might be pretty tackleable with an extension @riverogonzalez.isaac

ihsanzainal84 · 2024-12-19T23:54:21.611Z

Integrated Development Environment. Basically just somewhere to write code. Something like the HTML editor we have now.

hi_bubble · 2024-12-20T00:31:06.858Z

Setting up a role system each and every time
If I have a table with important but hidden values that I need to use and I am ready to deploy this it always takes hours for me to either re-create the table in the live version or to export it from dev, transform the data somehow in order to be able to re-upload it (since the db only takes numbers with a dot but exports it with a comma)
converting elements to re-usables takes a huge amount of time.

mitchbaylis · 2024-12-20T00:56:38.612Z

I put my harsh comments into gpt and told it to be less mean lol

my comments were very brief and mean and some forum users have told me to be less “directed” so I thought I’d get gpt to tone it down

mitchbaylis · 2024-12-20T01:03:06.599Z

use custom events to get around the expressions limitations

set custom fields on the event and then map each part of the expression into it

ie
search for X then sum (1 field)
search for Y then sum (2nd field)

the custom event can just have a return result in it
it uses slightly more WU I guess but man is it so much easier to maintain and update

boston85719 · 2024-12-20T12:03:09.861Z

Not being able to see the condition as it was evaluated in the logs, especially when the condition failed.

When changing an option set display value, it doesn’t change the ID, so in logs always seeing the original display value rather than the current display value.

WUs not being labeled properly or not adding up based on public pricing sheet.

Needing to switch between design, backed workflows and APIs

Trying to search logs based on retention window to be told the duration of search is too large.

Not being able to search by a action type in logs.

Overall, the fact that logs are terrible, WU pricing is confusing because of not properly labeled or not publicly known, both of which result in me needing to communicate with support.