Over the past few months, there have been a number of posts and questions about the roadmap, office hours, and general concerns around product stability. We understand the recent delays in communication on our side have caused frustration, but we have taken this time to align our priorities and focus areas, and are now able to confidently share our plans moving forward.
AppSheet’s renewed focus - stability and reliability
We have heard the feedback that platform quality has not lived up to everyone’s expectations, and we recognize that the #1 priority for an enterprise service like AppSheet has to be stability and reliability. Consequently, AppSheet engineering will be focusing on stability and availability for the platform, including ongoing bug resolution and providing support to customers. The unfortunate side effect of that investment is that new feature development will be significantly reduced, with a limited set of key features being delivered. We will continue to revisit progress against these goals on an ongoing basis and will share any updates here in the community as needed.
Ongoing community engagement
As a result of this new focus, our community engagements have shifted to being more supportive on immediate product issues as they arise. This will mean less of a focus on our prior community engagement activities such as office hours and long-term roadmap reporting. We will continue to evaluate this engagement formula moving forward.
We realize this update has taken longer to communicate than we would’ve hoped, but we sincerely appreciate your patience on this important update.
@cschalk_ws Thank you for an update from Management, appreciate it to a point.
As Steve mentioned, it is not really different to what’s been said before.
Is this decision on par with other platforms, as new features attract people and make the platform really unique, so improving with both Reliability and stability are all important.
Or, does this tell us that the team cannot handle both growing the platform and maintaining the platform due to lack of staff or priority in Google workspace?
May I also ask if this approach in prioritizing reliability and stability will be inclusive of bringing the many already existing Preview features to GA. Most of them have been in this state for months and some years, I would not consider them new features, but rather abandoned partially completed features that now need to be brought in maturity with the rest of the platforms reliability and stability.
Yes, in addition to stability and reliability, we’ve also been assessing our overall feature catalog. We intend to either bring long standing Preview Features to GA, or turn them down if they are no longer impactful or relevant. Our general goal is to improve operational efficiency with the key features that our customers depend on the most.
There may be a few tough messages coming through, but I would like to encourage thick skin and a soft heart towards many of us to regain trust.
The AppSheet platform has been a passion for many and alot of people invest alot of time into eachother to help.
I can’t speak for others but I have felt that for over two years there actually hasn’t been many new features and to now hear chances are even slimmer can be unsettling.
New Charts system was unfinished and half baked, promises of Gantt gave sparks of hope this would be brought up to scratch. Perhaps Getting looker/data studio charts to display inside appsheet would have solved so much. Desktop preview and new mobile framework felt refreshing but got left alone… Calendar view is archaic…
So much more could have been done in two to three years and maybe getting a way to vote things in would be great.
I saw the recent update regarding the 2026 strategy. While improving stability makes sense, the scale-back of the roadmap and the overall lack of transparency around product direction are definitely disappointing.
If the team is taking time to re-evaluate the platform’s core foundation this year, I’ve shared some thoughts in the community on a few structural gaps. I’m just passing these along in the hope that they might be helpful to consider as you work on long-term reliability:
I have to say this post sounds like a cry for help! Your team must be under-resourced!
Gemini didn’t make your team orders of magnitude more productive? Guess what - us either!
That’s why it’s so important that Google focus on improving AppSheet to keep Workspace users able to do self-service and automation - Gemini is not a magic bullet.
I hope my message is taken into consideration by you. As an AppSheet content creator, it is extremely disheartening to see a message like this.
Unfortunately, I was already expecting an update as negative as this one. It is noticeable that Google is so hyper-focused on developing AI solutions to the point of abandoning its existing projects instead of integrating AI to improve them. For us developers, it feels like a constant “forced relocation” to whatever the newest, favorite platform happens to be.
Excuse my bluntness, but coming to the community to write an “update strategy letter” just to say there will be a reduction in the release of new features is somewhat unnecessary. We already know that. We haven’t relied on new updates for months. We have been (up until now) for over two months without a single Release Notes (notas de lançamento) while the community posts more and more about features that used to work and are now breaking.
@Steve is right. We cannot trust the few updates we do get. New chart editor? Gantt? Template Assistant? So many updates that haven’t even been mentioned for over a year, and now we are going to get FEWER updates?
Fortunately, I am finishing my programming studies and learning new tools, while simultaneously recommending them to my entire community in Brazil. As I have already said multiple times in my videos and currently answer everyone: Detach yourselves from AppSheet, learn new platforms and tools. It might be that soon its next update will be published on killedbygoogle.com.
I can volunteer for you guys for free to build features using Claude code that a typical organization and ordinary people would need, including both minor and major features. Incredibly sad to see it looks like an old platform with no more development or imporovement even with all these large distribution of people using it.
Thank you for sharing your future direction.
It might be a tedious journey for a while, but it is far better than walking in the dark without a roadmap.
However, please allow me to point out a few essential issues from my personal perspective.
First, AppSheet team should complete this post as soon as possible.
No matter how much you emphasize stability, it lacks persuasion as long as this post remains incomplete.
Second, I strongly believe it is a mistake to report outages through the community forum. (This is strictly my personal opinion.)
Google already has a Service Status Dashboard, and AppSheet is already included there.
Why don’t you commit to providing timely updates on this dashboard?
My guess is that Google’s internal operations are too complex, making it difficult to even manage updates on the status dashboard properly.
If internal communication is failing, there is no way you can effectively communicate with end-users.
Third, I think it is inevitable that the development of new features for AppSheet is paused due to the rapid advancement of AI solutions. (Even for Google, it is impossible to do everything at once.)
That is exactly why I want the AppSheet team to articulate your vision: what AppSheet should look like in the upcoming AI era, and how you want users to leverage it.
That is what makes a truly visionary company.
I am sure the AppSheet team already knows this, but perhaps the company has become too large to maneuver as you wish. Even so, this is a monumental task that only you can accomplish. I sincerely wish you the best of luck.
I can’t believe this—is this a joke?
After months of waiting, this is the news we get?
There is a separate thread, where you invited people to register for AppSheet Office Hours, and now after such a long time, you say that there will be no such event?
I don’t mean to be rude, but this post is shocking.
The amount of passion I put into building solutions partially based on this platform is off the charts, which is why I never thought I’d start to feel disillusioned.
I remember when I met you @cschalk_ws two years ago in Berlin during the GW Devs Summit, and had the chance to chat for a bit—back then, I had a feeling that AppSheet would grow, but…
I just can’t bring myself to believe these words
We know the announcement was not going to taken as a simple ‘return to business as before’ message, but as we mentioned in our post, the side effect of our investments for the future is that we had to scale back our normal feature delivery and focus on platform stability while publishing only key features that have clear and immediate business impact and/or improve product stability.
Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress and we’ll be engaging continuously throughout.
Again, we apologize for any additional angst, but please know that we are still here working our best to see us through this time and we expect to come out with a more stable, secure product as a result.
Yes, you are hitting the exact areas that we are focusing on internally, so your feedback is very much appreciated. We’re also reviewing how we investigate and report outages so we can recover quickly and promptly report back our analyses.
As AppSheet does not currently engage the community, your statement can only mean you intend to start. I do not believe that. You could have been engaged continuously already. In fact, you’ve disengaged over time, despite previous pronouncements to the contrary. So your statement here is likely more of the same: a lie.
Where will those issues be reported in the future?
To reiterate, just like with other GCP and Google Workspace services, I believe the correct approach is to report issues on the Status Dashboard when they occur.
With so many critical responses coming in, I’d like to share a different perspective. I genuinely welcome the direction you’ve outlined.
Stability and reliability first
The major outage on April 28th is still fresh in memory, but even before that, we in the Asia region had been experiencing intermittent smaller-scale outages. Each time, we had to investigate the issues, restore corrupted data, and rerun our tests. In my previous posts, I have consistently expressed that improving platform stability and reliability matters more to me than new features. I am sincerely glad that you have now made a clear commitment to focus on exactly that.
On community engagement
The reality is that this community has become the fastest and most practical channel for discovering, sharing, and raising awareness of platform issues. To me, shifting the focus toward responding more quickly to bugs and outages matters more than maintaining office hours or long-term roadmap reporting. If that is the direction you are moving in, I welcome it.
A personal perspective on new features
I already consider AppSheet to be a nearly complete platform. For my own use cases, I am able to deliver real value without needing new features. The more functionality a system accumulates, the more complex it becomes — and the harder it is to maintain stability. I believe focusing on stability and reliability is the right call.
Communicating under this kind of pressure is not easy. Thank you for engaging with the community, and I’m rooting for you and the team.
I’d like to offer my help in ANY way that I can! As a long time user of the AppSheet platform, I am aware of a number of existing issues (certainly not all) that should be addressed to help make BOTH developers and users interaction with the platform and resulting apps more smooth and user friendly.
Additionally, there have been several attempts over the years, by myself and others, at compiling a list of actual bugs and/or functional deficiencies. Not new features … but actual existing production functionality that DOES NOT serve the community well and can benefit from changes. I’m certain several of us lomng-standing users of the platform can provide such a list. One may already exist.
I personally believe AppSheet is the BEST platform available for its intent - to quickly develop apps, or even complete systems, that serve the INTERNAL needs of Businesses/Enterprise operations. I have reviewed several other platforms over the years (though admittedly not in the past couple of years) and no one has come close to providing the same level of comprehensive Business focused functionality.
I understand the frustrations of many users. Some are trying to build retail based apps or non-business type apps and want a more appealing User Interface and certain other functionalities in a no-code fashion. Others are attempting to build certain features and are dissatisfied with the compromises or workarounds they need to make. They seem to be unaware that their “needs” are low frequency items. AppSheet/Google would do well to more strongly advertise the intended uses of the platform, guide users in ways to use the platform for these non-business usages and the trade-offs/compromises they should expect in unsupported features.
The platform is not perfect even for business usages, but no software EVER is, and I hope this “renewed focus” is simply a way to show the user base AppSheet’s commitment to a better platform!!!
@cschalk_ws Reply to this post or reach out in a direct message, if there is anything I can do help during this period of renewed focus!
