Adalo Makers,
We’re headed into the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, but before logging off for a few days to eat too much and scream at the television (football) I wanted to send along a quick update of what’s going on at Adalo.
Performance/Infrastructure Updates
Thanks to enormous and ongoing investments the Adalo infrastructure has enjoyed the longest period of stability in the company’s history. We’re not perfect, and the recent November 11 stability issues were quite frustrating, however two major positive outcomes came from that event.
The first is that we made a significant infrastructure change which dramatically improved the way Adalo apps manage database connections. The second is that we reassigned two members of our technical team to work full time on a project we’re calling ATIA (Adalo Total Information Awareness) that gives us the ability to immediately peer into our network infrastructure from many different vantage points. This prioritization is already paying off and giving us even more insights into how Makers are using Adalo. One very interesting side-effect of the latter outcome is we are soon going to be able to provide Makers with real-time alerts whenever custom actions fail so stay tuned for more information about this.
New Features and Platform Improvements
About 20 years ago programming demigod Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow, among other things) wrote a blog post titled “The Broken Window Theory” which has informed a lot of my own thinking about software development. In this post his concluding sentence is “Maybe we should be sweating the small stuff.” I am in complete agreement with this statement. Details matter. In fact this quarter we assigned one of our best developers to fix a laundry list of minor shortcomings and annoyances in the Adalo Builder, basically making tweaks that in aggregate will result in a dramatically better experience. Here are a few examples of improvements that are now available to all Makers:
- New expand/collapse feature for component layers
- New toggle feature for screen connectors
- Easier access to Collection documentation
- Improved font size input editing
Makers can also upload their own custom icons! This was actually released back in August but we have been making steady improvements to it ever since. We’ve also continued making improvements to scheduled notifications, and recently saw this feature being used in conjunction with a conference app that sent out approximately 27,000 notifications in a brief period of time!
Google Sheets Integration
We continue making solid progress towards offering a native Adalo integration for Google Sheets. I have been personally testing this feature to manage a digital version of my stamp collection records, and it’s pretty cool. If you want to test it out send me an email at jason.gilmore@adalo.com.
Agentic AI App Building
More to come on this but we continue edging towards an alpha release of an AI-powered app builder. We are intent on this tool being a companion to the Adalo Builder rather than a replacement, and intensely focused on it providing Makers with clear and obvious productivity gains rather than just dumping inaccurately interpreted components onto the screen. We hope to release an alpha version of this feature by the end of 2025.
Adalo Expert Reviews
We have been working hard on revamping the Adalo Experts directory, including auditing the directory and requiring Experts to complete a technical project building exercise. But we’re not done yet, and want to hear from Adalo Expert clients. Have you recently worked with an Adalo Expert? Submit a review about your experience!
Feel free to email me anytime at jason.gilmore@adalo.com
Jason
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Jason Gilmore
Adalo CTO