There can be a lot of cases when you need 2 or more apps connected to a shared database (Customer app, Admin app etc.). For exmaple, I have some ready-to-use solution, such as a delivery app. This app has a customer app, admin webApp & courier app.
I own an app development agency and I have many customers who own some restaurant or cafe and want to use my delivery app.
Now I have 3 choices:
- Share all new apps with a single database. Each my customer will have a separate apps set (Client, Admin, Courier) with customized colors, texts, settings & branding, but all these apps will be connected to a single database. This will create a huge amount of data and every new customer will slow down this app.
- I can copy one app from this set (for example, an Admin WebApp) with a copy of its database. In this case I’ll need to create other apps (Client and courier apps) for each new customer from a blank page. Copying screens & setting up all the actions for these blank apps will take a pretty much time.
- I can create an external database and integrate it with API, but this solution has a very limited possibilities because it is very hard to set up all relations properly. Right now I can’t even create a simple Airtable record from Adalo using some custom form. I can’t set a relations in Airtable or any other external DB from Adalo. And it is also much more difficult to use Adalo with external Users DB.
So, it will be much more useful if I will have an ability to merge all Adalo apps which are using shared Adalo collections base in a project and copy this project and its collections base.
This can be achieved in several ways: - You can add a functionality which will automatically merge all apps that use a shared database in a “Project” and add a button to copy this project and its base.
- Or you can add a button to save the single app as a “private template”.
How it will work:
- You have a set of 3 apps as mentioned before (Client, Admin, Courier)
- You copy one of these apps with a copy of collections base (for example, Admin App).
- Then you save 2 other apps as a private templates, create new apps with these templates and link them to the copy of the original collections base that you’ve created on the previous step.
This functionality will allow your users to launch more complicated apps and easy scale them without wasting much time just copy-pasting screens, actions and so on.
I understand that this solution will probably increase your own servers load, but this will be very helpful for development agencies who have a lot of clients in the same niche. You can add some billing plan special for agencies. I think it will be possible to pay a little bit more for the opportunity to easy scaling all their solutions, customize them to a different niches and increase the number of clients.