Slow app please help

[Rozza]

@jessehaywood

His response was to the point. He said, “Get customers before thinking about scalability.”

This is worrying, I am increasingly concerned that this is what Adalo have done.

@jessehaywood
Can you list the top 5 apps by record count built with Adalo? You know the big guns.
How many tables, records, users. Concurrent users. Top features of said apps?

I’ve just loaded 2.5k records into my app for testing and it has ground to a halt. This forms the basis of my post.

Does Team Adalo have a serious and fully fledged demo app similar to Microsofts’ ‘Northwind’, which shipped with Access. Maybe that could be made public and form the benchmark or boundary envelope of what is actually achievable.

Can you also elaborate on the shared resources that our apps run on? If more resources are needed for an app with lots of users /records then it’s only right that app pays for such resources and doesn’t take away from the rest of the swarm. I am happy to pay btw. How are things balanced at the moment. I understand you might not know the answers straight away, but can you please ask internally.

Thanks!

[jessehaywood]

@Rozza

This is worrying, I am increasingly concerned that this is what Adalo have done.

That’s a good point. We’re 2-3 years old (Nov. 12, 2019 was launch) and we were relatively bootstrapped and in a proof of concept up until the seed round in 2020. I would actually still consider it a proof of concept until Series A at the beginning of 2021. So I would say the first part of Adalo’s history was focused on getting customers and receiving feedback on the product over focusing on scalability. Since Series A, we hired a bunch of engineers and a VP of Engineering who are tackling scalability and performance head on this year. The team is in the identifying and scoping phase right now. They have to figure out the root issues to performance and then scope how the team will tackle the problems. I don’t communicate with that side of the business much, so all I know is they’re making some great headway.

To the other stuff, I definitely don’t have the answers to that right now, nor do I know where to look. Getting those answers would require me to reach out to a few different departments and have some back and forth with people. I’ll do my best to find answers to what I can, but I’m not promising anything.

[Rozza]

@jessehaywood Thanks for this reply.

I think Adalo should really update their literature with known limitations. Right now you are signing up new customers, for them to later learn in the forums about major issues with performance, and that advertised features of Adalo have to be stripped out of your app to make it function at any kind of acceptable speed.

Right now we build something, test as we go, all works fine, then it gets marginally too big and pop. We have to go round and around compromising, stripping out functionality we have spent time learning to build. One screen too many, a relationship too many, too many lists on a page and it all falls down.

Why not hard code the limitations so our apps are optimised as we build? I believe this is already done with record sum operations… with relationships you can only go 2 or 3 layers deep to get an average. eg:
Cities > Bars > Drinks = Average / Count / Min / Max / Total options given
Cities > Bars > Drinks > Ingredient = Min / Max / Total

Limit the number of relationships? Lists? Screens? Tell us upfront and we can build within these parameters.

Lists-in-Lists are advocated in your help files, yet Adalo experts on the forum (payroll and affiliated) advise against. This is just one example. Many to many relationships is another.

I’ve been reading for the best part of a year about the focus on improving performance, but you say…

@jessehaywood

The team is in the identifying and scoping phase right now. They have to figure out the root issues to performance and then scope how the team will tackle the problems.

To me this doesn’t sound like improvements will be rapid, perhaps only within 2022? I appreciate the openness nevertheless.

Sorry to go on here. Another issue is quality of paid components in the marketplace, they don’t appear to be meet the rigorous guidelines that Adalo set out in it’s white paper for components. When one of these components fails and the developer doesn’t deem it economical to maintain and update then what do we fallback to?

I’m a fan of Adalo and we are all invested in it’s success. I understand you don’t know the answers but somebody in Adalo does, so please come back to us. I note that in the help files a lot of the demos are based on the ‘travel app’. So perhaps we can consider this the ‘Northwind’ equivalent? Or one of the demo cloneable apps? Can we load one with a tonne of data and demonstrate what Adalo can do.

Thank you

[Toddy]

Thanks for expressing this honest feedback. Well said. @Rozza

@jessehaywood

1. I’ve never used an Adalo app with many records. I would love to test a few examples.

2. There seems to be a lot of focus on the marketplace, not core features. i.e. Support, speed, alignment tools, education to name a few. (I get this mental image of the Adalo board steering towards their goals before customers’. I hope that I am wrong)

3. Scaling too early, immediately after funding, seems to be a road to failure for many startups. I don’t want Adalo to fail.

4. Adalo has a few segments of users. I would urge Adalo to focus on ONE, first.

IF you’re not sure, let me give you a hint: Focus on the segment with the biggest pain. (This is not advice coming from stupid Toddy. This is coming from an extremely experienced software & hardware startup guy. He has a higher IQ and more experience than most of Adalo’s employees combined - not bragging. simply offering good free advice from someone that knows - not going to name drop)

And, from what I can tell, Adalo is not REALLY FOCUSED on this segment with the biggest pain. Adalo’s attention appears to be split.

5. I have customers to serve. Adalo is an option. Being fast, reliable, and easily learnable is far more important than 99% of the bells and whistles, that apparently have issues, in the marketplace. Right now, it’s risky for me to use Adalo. I want to use it. I waiting on the sidelines and saving money. I have already interviewed & pitched my customers. They are eager to try it. Like me, they don’t want to risk money.

6. Alternative value proposition for Adalo:

Make it free. With many more records & some popular components. Free for 3-6 months. If the app I build & Adalo provides value, then you have customers locked-in. I will NEED to pay for Adalo because I have a few hundred people that signed up and are paying. As well as other reasons… like, I’m by myself & there is no way I will have time to rebuild with an Adalo competitor.

This, in-turn, gives Adalo A LOT less churn and likely a few other benefits. Including, a forum filled with less posts with issues, and more posts bragging about the cool stuff they built… it’ll work so well, I will want to show it off (i.e. marketing for Adalo) As is now, Adalo users are doing a lot of marketing for Adalo. The wrong kind because of speed (it seems) I would think that this is worse than no marketing at all. I hope your team is thinking about this kind of stuff… trade-offs Adalo is making.

Again… just a thought. Nothing personal. You rock, Jesse. Think about it and share internally. Because I’m taking a break from voting for features until the basic ones are great.

[LuisNavarro]

I’ll add my 2 cents here because feedback will hopefully make adalo get better and so far I’m enjoying it. I personally do not mind paying for a product in development as long as it can do what I need to some extent.

However, I’m a bit concerned about launching my app since it’s been a bit slow, in fact too slow for the little amount of data I have per screen.

I’m a software engineer and I understand what bloat is. My app is not heavy on data that needs to be fetched from the db and the 3 second loading time for each screen seems too much for an app that only has text and a Lottie here and there. The reloading when going back is particularly frustrating imho.

I have decided to use Adalo because the interface is clean, it’s not bloated at all - as opposed to bubble - and the editor runs fast on my m1 mba.

Yes, there are some limitations in creating something with great UI and you need to figure some workarounds to get stuff done, but this is a NoCodeTool. So, I wouldn’t complain too much about these features, but performance needs to be fixed asap.

@jessehaywood