We're Antonio, David, Jason, and Mark. We’re building Glide (https://glideapps.com). Before this we worked on Xamarin, quicktype, Ubuntu, Mono, and GNOME Do :D
Glide makes it easy & fun for anyone to create apps without code. Pick a Google Sheet and Glide assembles a polished, data-driven app that you can customize, share as a PWA, and publish to the App Store and Google Play if you desire.
We've spent the last decade building developer tools. In that time we've watched thousands of developers struggle to design, implement, and maintain apps, and most developers we know avoid mobile development altogether.
Apart from developers, we hear worthy app ideas from non-technical colleagues, friends, and family every day: apps for work, new business ideas, and silly apps just for fun. All of these people can make websites, so why can't they make apps?
We were dismayed to find that there are hundreds of 'low-code app builders', but none that excited us. They're enterprisey, they output kludgy apps, and their low-code contrivances often felt more complicated than the code they replaced. Why hasn't anyone made the Google Docs or Figma of apps yet, we wondered.
That's our ambition. Glide makes app development web-based, collaborative (coming), and fun by combining data-bound components with a familiar spreadsheet model. Spreadsheets are the most successful programming model of all time, and smartphones are the most successful computer, so we're bringing them together to enable anyone to create apps without code.
We've implemented a component model based on self-adjusting computation (http://www.umut-acar.org/self-adjusting-computation), which allows Glide apps to update efficiently and continuously just like spreadsheets. You can see the benefit of this in our Comments component, which syncs comments in real-time to instances of the same app. In other words, Glide apps are multiplayer by default.
We're just getting started and would love feedback on the approach. There are many technical/design challenges ahead of us but we are encouraged by the useful apps our users have created with this early version. We even use Glide to build Glide–internally we've created dashboard apps, an app to share updates with our advisors, a directory that shows us which Glide apps are trending, and an app for our YC group.
Next on our roadmap: forms, improved image handling, notifications, and offline.
- Get started: https://go.glideapps.com/?signUp
- Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smNwrz9wMxU
- App templates: https://www.glideapps.com/samples
Thank you.
(The Glide app builder cannot be opened on mobile yet)
However, that would require allowing a company to be self-hosting. We don't use Slack, for example, we use RocketChat, as no information has to go off-campus...it's all stored locally.
Any plans to release that sort of approach?
Curious if your tech works with a CSV file. Did you ever consider it? What will it take given your current stack? How google docs dependent are you? Are you okay with google buying/cloning you out if it comes to that?
1) I'm not really understanding how the apps are shared? Ex. when a user scans the QR code or opens the glide app link sent to them, do the apps open in a browser from the phone? The UI shown on the website don't seem to have a URL bar or browser navigation so I'm a little confused as to what actually happens...
2) I find that one of the harder parts of developing an app is getting the App Store/Google Play Store account/license/certificates/submission process. Do you guys have plans to streamline this with tools such as Fastlane? Maybe a developer portal to easily import this to App Store Connect or Google Play Console?
Glide apps are first and foremost PWAs. We're rolling out shortlink support soon, so your app would be something like mycoolapp.glideapp.io. Android will prompt you to add the app to your homescreen, and on iOS we show a similar prompt. You can pay for a custom domain.
On our paid plan, we can export native builds for you to publish to app stores. Currently we have a React Native implementation of Glide that runs the app natively, rather than wrapped.
Yes, we are looking into streamlining the store publishing process in any way we can, and fastlane will come in handy. We've been surprised by how many users have been satisfied with PWAs so far, though.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...
Edit: And its broken with a Firebase error "Error : could not handle request".
When I click "New App," there's a modal popup that says, "In order to select an item from your online storage, please sign in." I click "Sign in" and another popup opens and closed immediately. I click it again and the same thing happens, but then the center modal is replaced with, "There was an error! Details: The feature you requested is currently unavailable. Please try again later."
I wasn't seeing the normal Google auth screen; I signed-out to see if there was an account sync issue, and I can't seem to sign back in now. I click sign-in, the normal Google auth screen pops-up, I select my account, and the button in the bottom-left corner gets stuck on "Signing in..."
GET https://cdn.segment.com/analytics.js/v1/s5swIuWdyLEwzdp3HXwc... net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
Found one bug with the "tiles" layout: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8e31lzzjdmin6x/Screen%20Shot%2020...
You might consider chopping long titles with ellipses.
Also, do you plan on adding or integrating a service (not sure if doable) for push notifications (for new content, reminders, etc)?
Otherwise, I'm impressed by the quality of the PWA (thought it might be React Native based at first) and the "it just works" factor.
We will add more options to customize the look of the apps. It's important to us not to overload users with fine-grained controls that require design expertise to get good-looking results, though.
Anyways, glad it's on the roadmap! I'll keep an eye on it.
Other authentication types are on our roadmap, but I can't give you a timeline.
You also need to pay to publish on Play Store right? Although it is a one time payment instead of subscription.
I watched to intro video, when you add the comment component, what's storage for that user input?
Looks good!
Our YouTube channel is probably the best source of info for now.
Comments are stored adjacent to the sheet in our real-time backend, and are associated with the sheet row via the Topic that you pick. Notes are stored in the sheet, so are not real-time.
Do you mean uploads from the app? What kinds of media are you interested in, specifically? Right now we don't handle that, but we'd love to learn more about what you need.
Thanks Guys
Hope you don't mind working at Google, or if you add excel/O365 support, Microsoft. Seems like a no brainer acquisition target for them!
From a practical standpoint, it's a data source where people already have their data. People sign up for Glide and literally create their first app in minutes and it's ready to share. Much of this speed is due to the fact that their data is ready to go.