I am developing a mobile app for a client and giving Adalo a try. I have a few questions. Is there any limits on
(1) number of collections,
(2) number of rows within a collection,
(3) number of app downloads, and
(4) app data traffic?
The app is going to have less than 50 screens, 10 collections, and about 1,000 rows per collections except one. That one collection is going to be used for usage report to record the date and time, user, and screen that they were at. It is going to have 20,000 - 50,000 rows per year. Keeping 2 years of data, the collection would be about 40,000 - 100,000 rows. Will that cause any performance issue? And on Adalo, is there a way to auto purge rows based on date?
I have try asking those questions, hopefully we can get answers here in real life examples, not claim.
My experience has just reach almost 5k records, without index, it takes around 15 seconds to filter data, I use paging, but after getting indexed it is around 7 seconds.
If your collection can be distributed to more collections then it will be one of the workarounds.
But like others have said, focus on getting the MVP running first, get more tractions as much as possible then worry about other things later.
If you are not building for MVP and already have certain customers, you might want to go ahead with more firmed solution.
There’s really a balance of how serious you are here. To be frank, almost no apps last two years. So planning on that probably isn’t the best place to start.
My recommendation is to start on Adalo, if you make it past 6 months, then migrate to external collections.
If you’re really serious about this and want to go through the time investment / learning curve, Adalo works with external collections well as a front-end. We personally use Supbase for some apps that have too much data or require logic not available in Adalo. As a guess, I’d say it’ll take 2-3x longer to build using external collections, so pick your poison.
My client already has an app. Only has about 1000+ downloads. It is an industry specific app. Most of his traffic is coming from his website. My client’s app is 3+ years old. The app is very simply. Basically it is running as a hub. It allows users to locate industry specific information. 90% of the information are URL links. The current app opens the URL with a browser. With Adalo I can keep users within the app using the Web View component.
Once my client get the new mobile app going, he would like to move his website to Adalo’s Web App platform also. So the collections can be shared between the Web and App especially the usage data.
I am trying to keep everything within Adalo to make it simply. But if 6 months past and I have to look for migrating to an external collections, I am fine with that. I just want to make sure the max # of rows per collection won’t be a problem for the usage data. I don’t want to reach its limit within a few months.
As for me, ~1000 records in several collections shouldn’t be a problem for Adalo, especially if you’re not going to display them all at once.
For the collection with 50K rows - I’d suggest “offloading” it to external DB from the very beginning. In my experience it is difficult to handle this amount of data in Adalo at the moment (I’m not saying it’s not possible - I’m saying you might have glitches in some unexpected places).
There are few topics reg. performance worth reading:
One final note - app speed and performance doesn’t depend solely on the backend (Adalo servers), it also heavily depends on the app itself. If you try to load 10K items at one time - I guess any no-code or full-code application will not be fast to do it
