I’m a newbie and looking to build my first market place app. The app will have 3 user types, profiles with image/video, transactions/bookings, chat, calendar management, push notifications, Reviews, and ideally Social Sharing and GPS tracking.
I was originally learning bubble and saw the UI for Adalo… watched Adalo videos… and became convinced I wanted to build on Adalo. So here’s my questions:
With the above features I mentioned… any concerns or issues I should be aware of?
75% of my demographic would use the IOS/Android app… the rest would use web browser… but I only see options for one or the other?
I’m choosing Adalo because of the ease of use, however what am I losing? Is Bubble going to be faster and more feature rich?
If my app takes off… how do I scale off Adalo? Do I export code to a dev team or API connect the database to a custom coded app?
Anything else I should be aware of when choosing Adalo over the other options out there? (My goal is an MVP that can scale to enough profit or attract enough VC dollars to invest in custom code.)
If you’re looking for a mobile app, then you really have to go with Adalo. You won’t get the same experience with Bubble.
To answer some of your detailed questions:
Adalo is in the middle of a revamp to web apps. In the future, we’ll like be developing mobile and web at the same time. Right now you develop them on separate projects, but that’ a good thing from our perspective. You can share the database and copy and paste between projects, but the web app should be different than the mobile app… One would expect their apps to not be websites and their websites to not be apps, personally.
Bubble definitely has more features and design elements, again mostly because it’s focused on building web apps which are different in nature. We expect Adalo to significantly improve on this front when the paid component marketplace is released.
if/when you’re ready to scale off Adalo, you can’t take the code with you. You can export your DB in your new app. I think that makes sense too. If you’re building a custom app, you don’t want to start with your Adalo code or you’d just keep it in adalo. FYI there’s an app with +100k users that was built on Adalo, so you have a long way to go before you scale off
If you have any other questions, let me know. Always happy to chat but in short, you’ve already made the right choice if you’re looking to build a mobile app.
@Erik Thanks for the response. Are you able to share which app has 100k users? Would love to download and check out speed/functionality!
And am I understanding correctly that I can build web app and mobile apps separate, but they can share the same database? (That sounds pretty reasonable and potentially preferred.)
Is there a timeline on the paid marketplace you referenced?
Unfortunately, I can’t share, as it was shared confidentially with me. We’re working with the Adalo team to start showcasing some of these in the future, but not available yet.
For the different apps, what you probably want to do is create the mobile app, set everything up etc. Then create a new app, select desktop, under advanced you’ll see this option to share a DB. That’ll keep both apps in sync.
Then as you’re developing, you can copy and paste things between the two. So you can just bring in your mobile elements, paste them into desktop, resize and reconfigure.
