Customer Support Improvements Needed

General Discussion
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I’ve been using Adalo for about a month now and have started a small business, developing two apps that will soon be published on the App Store. While my experience is similar to many others, I am growing increasingly hesitant about investing more effort into Adalo. I worry that there might not be a sustainable business model in place, but only time will tell.

However, there are several significant issues that need to be addressed, which I’m sure the management team is aware of. To effect change, these concerns must be openly acknowledged and addressed as customer problems.

– The performance of the editor has deteriorated over the past week, sometimes becoming unusable. Network performance for app.adalo.com is subpar.

– In the past week, I have frequently encountered “not found” or “Bad Gateway” errors in the Previewer.

– Essential components, like location services, are either paid (NoCode Monkey) or provided by Pragmaflow (requiring expert knowledge to install and lacking support).

– The Adalo Component Marketplace rarely receives updates, leading me to wonder if the unspoken strategy is to outsource basic functionality to paid external providers.

– The company’s support system, rather than the individual support staff, requires significant improvements. For example, a simple one-sentence instruction about refreshing the SSL certificate after connecting a domain should be included on the connect domain screen. This issue reflects a problematic customer support culture. Additionally, outdated forum posts should be archived, and support staff should be available during European business hours and weekends.

– Compared to competitors like Flutterflow, there is a significant gap in support quality. While the technical platforms are different, Flutterflow’s approach to helping users design apps is superior. They offer detailed YouTube videos for learning, whereas Adalo’s resources consist of silent Google Drive videos and unanswered forum posts from years ago, with no documentation. Users shouldn’t have to rely on outdated forum posts to make basic app components work.

I initially chose Adalo due to its simple learning curve, app publishing capabilities, and reasonable starting price. However, after a month of preparation for my business launch, I’m concerned that the effort has outweighed the results.

/rant

2 Likes
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Learn Flutter/Dart. Invest your time into something that is free and that you control 100%. I redeveloped my apps within a month from leaving Adalo and I’ve never looked back!

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I have been using it also and started last October 2022 time frame and having so many issues reaching support. I am not sure what to do. I wanted to release my app and found out my old developer DUET did something to my app and it’s not available. I need help from the support team. This company was terrible and were 4 months late on delivery and then wanted to charge me more. I had to get a new developer to finish the project. I have not had a good time so far using the platform. I need some help recovering my APP. Not happy! They need to start taking ratings on their third-party developers.

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I’m about a month into Adalo and the positives are amazing. For someone like myself, what I have achieved in 1 month would have taken at least 3 in most other paths and often at much much more cost. This is super valuable. I’ve been bragging to friends.

The negatives are tough to swallow and fall into 2 categories for me (much like you mentioned above):

  1. Lack of basic core components being part of the platform. Things that every app has and should not require a marketplace to find. Having to pay extra for things like form field validation or gestures or multi-image pickers, is crazy.

  2. Performance is borderline shippable. I’m struggling a little imagining I won’t receive negative feedback when I launch. I think the value proposition of building once and deploying to web + android + iOS comes at a cost of performance and the dev team having to manage and stay on top of a lot of dependencies. From what I’ve read online, react native “can” be just as good as native, but it requires very careful decisions and constant optimizations. I imagine this is difficult when building a platform that needs to support so many use cases.

At the size and maturity that Adalo is at now, one of the most important things Adalo needs right now is cheerleaders and case studies of success. The fact that I have been building a solid product for a month, posted a lot into these forums, and not once heard from a customer success person (or received an email) from Adalo asking how I’m going or how they can empower me or what I may be struggling with is core best practices for a startup. This will counter the struggles in the forums by highlighting the successes people are having - I’m sure there are a bunch, but I can’t see them anywhere.

My thoughts. on some things that could help:

  • Buy out core components from the markeplace from devs, make them part of the platform (this will make the devs happy, they’re not exactly selling thousands of them)
  • Find 10 active customers that are doing great work, give them consulting, help them over the finishline and give them some best practices to make sure they’re launching a quality product so you have success stories to share
  • Fix performance issues. If a customer is struggling with performance, ask the customer if you can clone their app and investigate. Then focus on performance. I know some great work was done with images lately, but there’s something else bottle-necking basic usability.
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