June 2025 update!

June Update

Hey all–it’s been a super busy couple of months at Adalo, and we’re absolutely cooking with new developments and system improvements. After significantly increasing the scope of delivering Adalo 3.0 (Adalo 2.0 and 3x the speed) we’re approaching the finish line! For us to declare Adalo 3.0 done (and do justice to the many makers that asked for improved speed), we decided that we had to deliver the following:

  1. Put all the old database infrastructure in the trash and make the switch to much faster, scalable infrastructure (I called it the Ferrari V12 engine) - done Dec 2024 :white_check_mark:
  2. Overhaul the 100+ backend systems that were deprecated, overly complex and inefficient - majority completed by Jan 25, but final systems done last week :white_check_mark:
  3. Review Adalo’s Builder codebase and rip out any bloated and inefficient code - done by Feb 25 :white_check_mark:
  4. Optimize caching, especially around images and rendering - done by March 25 :white_check_mark:
  5. Add database indexing - see the X-Ray update below! :white_check_mark:
  6. Upgrade React Native across the board (this is done, waiting on component developers to fix their components and we can roll it out!) :check_box_with_check:
  7. Refactoring Adalo’s code to stop pulling in lots of unnecessary things that you don’t need, especially on the first screen load. This update is underway, and thanks to AI making a significant impact on development velocity, I’m happy to report that we’re making very fast progress!

We want to deliver Adalo 3.0 before the end of September!

But we’re not only doing speed improvements!

We’re reaching top gear in terms of productivity with our team (which has continued to expand significantly). In fact, our current bottleneck is code reviews–as in we have so many development pushes that it’s hard to review it all fast enough! !

We want to call out a few highlights of what we’ve done, and then provide some commentary on what’s next.

What’s done (in addition to Adalo 3.0 work):

  1. Adalo X-Ray (beta) - AI that will look through your app and tell you exactly what is affecting your performance! Currently with 10% of makers!
  2. DreamFactory legacy (non-API) systems integrations (beta) - successful integrations of old and powerful systems into Adalo, meaning your app can ingest anything now!
  3. The foundational basis for AI prompt engineering, and many other AI-related offerings.
  4. A score of backend improvements, continuing on delivering improved speed and stability.

What’s next:

  1. Phased rollouts of the above to 100% of the community. We’re no longer pushing to everyone simultaneously to reduce any risk of performance issues.
  2. Adalo Function Hub (alphabeta) - a way to no longer need Make or Zapier for many purposes :slight_smile: For free!
  3. An Experts retest.
  4. AI prompt engineering, and a series of AI-based components.
  5. AI Chat - this is already in our staging environments, but we want to make sure its accuracy rate is improved before shipping it.
  6. A super secret, super cool project!

What’s done (including Adalo 3.0 work):

  1. Introducing Adalo X-Ray

We’ve found that in the absence of guardrails for how to build apps, Adalo’s builder flexibility has meant some Makers build apps with inefficient flows or data relationships, restricting their app speed.

To address this, we are happy to announce a new performance auditing feature called Adalo X-Ray. X-Ray can perform a real-time analysis of your application, providing feedback regarding:

  • The presence of nested lists and their location within specific screens.
  • Overall screen complexity.
  • The presence of orphaned screens, which unnecessarily increase the overall application size.
  • A database table summary, including record counts and relative table sizes.
  • Database performance metrics, including among other data tables and index cache hit ratio.

Check out the documentation here!

  1. Database indexing (through X-Ray)

Applications associated with databases containing tables having more than 10,000 records can be submitted for a special optimization audit. The below screenshot depicts the table and index cache hit ratio data for a mobile app.

For the past several weeks X-Ray has been available in limited beta and is currently being rolled out to a larger audience.

  1. React Native Upgrades

We’ve done a very heavy amount of software upgrades, which rolls in a number of performance and security improvements. This upgraded framework has been tested extensively on our staging servers until our team was unable to break anything!

Currently, we are waiting on our component developers to upgrade their components to ensure compatibility. This process is being overseen by Michael Heck, the (former) founder of No Code Monkey, so we’re appreciating his experience on ensuring the upgrades don’t break anything for any maker!

The upgrades will come with a toggle, so if you wish to run older builds on older React Native versions, you will be able to do that.

  1. DreamFactory Legacy System Integrations

Adalo is deployed into a surprisingly large number of corporations across the US, Europe and Japan because of its easy and fast way to spin up web and mobile apps. DreamFactory has enabled many of the older and more awkward systems used by these companies to sync beautifully with Adalo. Examples include Microsoft SQL Server (which comes with no API!), IBM DB2, proprietary ERP systems and AS400-based programs.

This remains in beta (ask if you would like access) but will form the basis of Adalo’s enterprise offering in the months ahead.

  1. A score of backend improvements

When we stepped into Adalo in September 2024, we set out to migrate ~140 services, including the entire structure of databases, to new services. By the close of 2024, we had migrated all but 4 of the services on our list. This last month, we finally completed migrating the last 4 services. It was an extraordinary amount of work considering we manage approximately 3 million PostgreSQL databases. While most Makers won’t see any change, the job of maintaining and running those databases (most of them on forever free plans) is made easier for us, which in turn makes it easier to improve the code base without breaking things. Shoutout to our amazing engineering team!

We have also been improving infrastructure monitoring across the board, and have deployed a new series of Prometheus dashboards to enable this monitoring. We intend to get this monitoring into Makers’ hands, but that will likely be a downstream priority.

Thanks to Maker feedback we were made keenly aware that our rush to release new features and bug fixes was at times counterproductive, and occasionally resulted in unexpected errors. In response, we have implemented a more rigorous and progressive production deployment sequence which is described in this blog post:

What’s Next?

Our team has been working on some major initiatives that will see the light of day in Q3, including:

  1. Phased rollouts of the above to 100% of the community. We’re no longer pushing to everyone at risk of slowing down apps.

  2. Adalo Functions Hub

  • It’s always been a challenge to manipulate data inside an Adalo app without relying on third-party tools such as Zapier. For instance, it is not possible to natively convert a string to lowercase or sort an array of numbers. We are very happy to announce that a new feature called Function Hub will soon offer Makers dozens, and eventually hundreds, of API endpoints for manipulating numbers, strings, dates, times, and more.
  • Function Hub is currently in an early stage of development, with the goal of releasing it to a wider audience in Q3. If you would like to be involved in shaping the development of this new feature please email Adalo CTO Jason Gilmore at jason.gilmore@adalo.com.
  • (Also, one of our teammates said we should call this ‘Magic Kitchen’. We’d love any comments if you would prefer to call this Function Hub or Magic Kitchen!)
  1. An Expert retest.
  • It has come to our attention that many of the Experts listed on the Adalo marketplace are no longer there, or have been providing unsatisfactory performance.
  • We will soon be issuing a retest for Experts to complete, which will require the use of X-Ray to help deliver a fast remake of an app that is specified by our team. The app will be the same for all Experts, and in the event that the Expert is unable to build the app with good performance speed (or they don’t participate in the retest), then they will be delisted from our Marketplace.
  • Experts that don’t build an app that is fast will be offered further training from our team. The goal is to ensure Adalo customers continue to get high-quality outcomes from their Experts.
  1. AI prompt engineering, and a series of AI-based components.
  • More to follow soon.
  1. AI Chat
  • This feature has now undergone four rounds of implementation due to both cost and quality considerations and is almost ready for production. We see this as a powerful feature to help Makers quickly move past any sticking points in their build. As soon as we are confident in the accuracy of this feature, it will be available to all users for free.
  1. A super secret, super cool project! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
10 Likes

Hey James, that sounds awesome! Working on a smarter search engine + displaying lists based on multiple parameters instead of just one is critical. Hopefully this can make it into Adalo 3.0. Thanks for all the great work!

Hi @james.crennan

Thanks for continuing to improve Adalo’s infrastructure. One more thing I wanted to add is SEO for web applications, if possible.

I can’t wait for the super secret project! :sweat_smile:

Thanks
Shantanu

Thanks for the update @james.crennan & Adalo team!

I am really optimistic of the future of Adalo and the improvements that have been made.

@james.crennan, is add ons based subscription now available? With Xano’s new pricing update, I would really like to build an Adalo app with Xano as the backend.

@james.crennan No Function Hub, no Magic Kitchen.. perhabs name it “Magic Hub” (as Magic Text) make sense, right? :grin:
Is awesome that at the same time i am learning to become an Adalo Expert, the platform get improvements like those.

Anxious to keep creating!
Jare Ramirez

Hi @james.crennan , great news, but we’re having SERIOUS, BUT SERIOUS, app performance issues. Many customers have complaints, we’ve lost money with clients… it’s an app that only recently had 35,000 records in the database with over US$150,000 in sales. It’s optimized with Xray, where all the components are less than 30 (in green). Pressing the menu button to go to a 6-button modal takes forever (and it doesn’t transfer the database or anything). We also made it so that . doesn’t have counters or calculations, instead running on screens and saving them to the logged-in user as numbers, but even with that, we’re still having a TON of PROBLEMS.

I’ve already sent many tickets. They’re looking into the issue, but meanwhile, we continue to lose app producers, clients, and money!

Something as important as something that works quickly in 2025. We’re not creating artificial intelligence or a vaccine that cures cancer. It’s a sales app where a user makes a purchase and sees their orders. The user sees the purchases made by their users… simple!

I’m a fan of Adalo. I have many clients. I make a living from this, but these things give me problems and don’t allow me to project growth in my apps or those of my clients.

3 Likes

@Santiago is that with Adalo’s own backend or an external backend? (Xano etc)

Also interested in knowing more details about this

With regards to the renewal of the Adalo experts, maybe some new tutorials would be beneficial, especially for building an app with DreamFactory features & external backends like Xano.

A fresh YouTube channel perhaps?

Almost everything is within Adalo, some things we bring from external databases, we have 11k users within Adalo, an order database within Adalo and order items within Adalo… these are low numbers for an app to be slow… we’re not talking about thousands… imagine if in the front end we filter orders from 10k users, maybe they’re only 5 users, and when entering the order, the order items from 12k are only 10 items…

We have many delays in transitions like from the home screen to pressing the button to go to the menu, it takes a long time, the scroll freezes… we analyzed migration options and everything, but the app is large because it has 4 panels sharing the same database and it’s a headache to start from scratch now.

3 Likes

Sorry to hear that @Santiago

Hopefully @james.crennan @wjgilmore and the team can help fix this?!

1 Like

@Santiago

I’m really sorry to hear the menu isn’t performing as expected and for the impact this has had on your business.

Our team just sent a reply to your ticket that I believe will be helpful, but I also wanted to share some additional context here in case it’s useful for others as well.

Your app is designed to work on both desktop and mobile, and you’ve done a great job managing that—which is no small feat given the unique challenges each platform presents.

That said, using a single screen for both platforms can work for simpler apps, but for more complex apps, it might be time to consider separate flows for mobile and desktop. This can help better optimize performance and user experience.

For example, the mobile version could include a menu icon that links to a screen specifically designed for mobile, while the desktop version could link to a different screen optimized for larger displays.

Please test out the suggestions we’ve provided, and if you run into any issues or need further assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out—we’re here to help.

Santiago–in addition to Kyle’s advice, could you please book a time with me to hop on a call? Here’s my calendar

I’ve looked through your exchanges, and seen that the Xray screenshots you’ve included still show things that are displaying as red. While this forum post isn’t the medium to discuss this, we’re obviously going to do everything we can to fix your app (and get your sales back).

(Also, while we’re looking at your app right now via a connection on the east coast of the US, your app looks fast. So a call would be great to make sure we’re not missing something)