As some may know I’ve been very critical lately about the platform and the desitions that are made in the background.
This have become another of Google’s data mining platforms in my opinion and the effort to integrate AppSheet to the rest of Google’s services has been the main goal while important problems inside the AppSheet platform keep beign ignored.
This shift is just so hard to accept, more so as a non-Google user since all of the “features” that Google is adding to AppSheet are Google-related and all of them are absolutely useless for me.
My frustration went far away after the community migration.
Why? I mean, I know why but why would you ignore the people that makes this platform cool and shinny eventhough there are so many flaws? Why would you ignore the people that makes workarounds and welcomes new members? Do you pay us? No. We want you to pay us? No. So, why don’t leave us on a tool that’s actually useful since we are basically free advertising for the platform? No idea.
Idk if the majority of people on the actual AppSheet team is new or something, but I feel like everyone is running to their own side. There is people working on the backend that I swear haven’t made any meaningfull AppSheet app themselfs.
This doesn’t make them bad people, I’m just saying they don’t know what AppSheet is really about and they are changing it anyway.
I just don’t know where this is going, but let me tell you AppSheet is not the go-to tool it was before for me. I’m now completely open to new experiences and platforms even if that means that my life as a no-code developer will be harder, because anyway it will be happier
To be clear, this has been an issue since I started using AppSheet. For basic to simple apps, AppSheet is great! When it comes to more complicated business apps things start to break down a bit.
There has always seemed to be a larger focus on the newer implementations with little to no follow-up on released items to smooth out some of the implementation defects/issues. And I get it..few developers really like going back to debug and analyze problems. It can be time intensive and it’s not nearly as rewarding.
But as you have said, @SkrOYC , that leaves little idiosyncrasies we App Creators have to deal with and workaround frequently or…even worse… end users are left to deal with.
An example? We still cannot create views with pleasantly aligned custom column widths. This comes up with every client I work with. And there are a number of others that I personally struggle with almost daily.
So how does AppSheet improve this?
The concept is relatively simple in my mind - two Development teams 1) New feature development 2) Improvement/Enhancement development. In practice, implementation of the concept is not so straight-forward for various reasons. I do think adopting an Agile Product Delivery methodology as the project management tool could greatly help deliver quality relatively defect-free features going forward.
I don’t know if the suggestions above are the best way forward. I do know that AppSheet is much more mature now. There needs to be a lot more attention on fixing and improving some of the years old aggravating issues to make certain the foundation stays solid. The new features won’t have much meaning if users and App Creators have to constantly fight with the platform to get things to work.
AppSheet recently spun up a Community Advisory Board. I have often thought the same thing is needed on the development side to help AppSheet truly understand the struggles some of us App Creators have when building our apps. Maybe the group could work directly with AppSheet developers to help smooth out the problem areas. I’ll volunteer for that!