So long and thanks for all the fish

I’ve had enough, and I’m going back to Glideapps. I’ve made two attempts to use Adalo in the last 12 months, and I’m leaving for the same reason both times.

The primary reason for my decision is the lack of customer support. And the sad fact is, I’m not alone as my comments are mirrored by enough people that I have concerns for this product.

About 12 months ago, when I was trying to decide which platform to use, my shortlist was Adalo and Glideapps. I chose to use Adalo first, and I spent a considerable amount of time developing, or at least trying to develop, an app in Adalo. We are talking tens of hours here, so it wasn’t just a toe in the water. I was fully submerged :slight_smile: When I had problems, I posted support tickets, someone was kind enough to answer them (In most cases), and in a large number of cases, I still had problems, and the ticket went unanswered beyond that point.

Due to the sheer frustration of not getting answers to my questions, I decided to look at Glideapps. Within a handful of hours, I virtually completed the app that I struggled to develop on Adalo, where I had invested 5 to 10 times more time and effort.

Essentially my success on Glideapps came down to the level of support. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Adalo a pitiful 2. But for Glideapps, I have no hesitation in saying 10 out of 10. The level of support in the Glideapps community is worlds apart from here. You are not in the same solar system.

I’m not trying to be mean; I’m trying to outline what I see as a significant problem and potentially highly detrimental to the long-time sustainability of the platform. I love the development environment in Adalo, and the level of control over the UI/UX experience is superb. Unlike Glideapps, I don’t feel like I am boxed into a corner and forced to use UI controls with limited extensibility.

Sadly, I won’t be coming back to Adalo any time soon. I was hoping 12 months would have been sufficient time to grow and develop a more extensive support community, but that’s not been the case.

Good luck and have fun.

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@Torrsy thanks for writing this text. The same disappointment you have I also have. I spent time and money at Adalo. I lost clients and my partner dropped out because our MVP had several problems with the Adalo platform. Every month we had new problems with the platform. Component bugs, unable to translate certain component alerts, instability and so on. Support is not even said, it does not exist. Replies to e-mails are the same, it is inactive. I just see @James_App_Maker answering what it can, but it really can’t help much. I’m talking to my lawyer about this issue, because I wasted money and time with Adalo and I can’t pay for something that doesn’t care about the quality of its services to its clients. @Ben @anon78309838 @KatelynCampbell @David

Ugh @Torrsy that’s sad to hear. I just paid for Adalo yesterday. I’m nearly across the line but have run into some issues. Community support is neat but not what I want as a paying customer - I just want to get over the line. There are key product questions I have (like can you include linked text and non-linked text in the same text component) and bugs I’ve run into (like editing in the text component is nearly unusable and publishing to Apple’s App Store doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe it’s PEBCAK tho?)

Plus, the support / ticketing system is brutal – rumor has it support@adalo.com is unmonitored so it’s impossible to have a back and forth conversation. And submitting a ticket requires 10 (!) fields to be filled out. I tweeted at @David and @Ben yesterday since it’s not even clear if the replies I sent to Adalo support emails are received.

The promise is good but I can’t ship an app based on a promise. it’s super painful - customers have questions because there are product or support gaps in the experience. That’s normal for an early stage product, but if the Adalo team’s not going to get people over the line customers will churn.

I’m going to give it a couple more weeks and if I can’t get my issues resolved I’ll sadly have to look elsewhere…

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Hi @Tay @kmm @Torrsy,

Support is Adalo’s #1 Priority. You could read a blog from Adalo about support here.


First of all, every startup has it’s up’s and down’s.

Adalo’s UP is the product.

  • Very fast to develop apps (less than 10 minutes)
  • You’re in control of mostly everything
  • Publish to the App Stores (something that Glide doesn’t have)
  • Design, it’s basically the canva of the no-code world. — Quote from @iAppsNi
  • I could go write an essay with all the features and components that are in Adalo but I don’t want to bore you. :slight_smile:

Adalo’s DOWN is the support.

  • Slow response times from support
  • Sometimes gets lost within all the other tickets

With all startups, there are challenges. Not every startup is going to be perfect. Adalo is a startup. There are some components that are not functioning how they are supposed to be and some bugs…but that’s part of the startup life.

There are over 200,000 active makers building apps on Adalo. If 100,00 makers submitted a support ticket, it would be very hard for 2 people to answer every single ticket, keep in mind — not all of the tickets are bugs — some are just “need help” questions that can be asked & answered in the forum.

Also, the component marketplace is getting an upgrade soon. The next evolution of the Marketplace as being for Components, Templates, Actions, Database Integrations, & Experts, along with a way to sell & monetize everything!

Around 15 - 20 new components shoud launch this year. (including some from myself!)

I hope you understand everything now! :slight_smile:

(CC: @Ben @David @anon78309838)

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Hi @Torrsy

I am sorry to hear that you don’t feel that Adalo support is able to provide the information that you need. We absolutely don’t want anyone to feel this is the case due to unanswered questions to our team, or tickets not being given the time they need.

To provide some context around the ticket form and support@ emails. The support@ email does not receive the same level of response times that the ticket form does. We outlined in our Statement of Support that questions and inquiries about your app need to come through our support ticket form. This is due a multitude of reasons, but the main one being information. We need a certain amount of info from you to be able to provide the best and quickest support in return. We ask that you complete 7 fields in the form. The first is your email associated with your Adalo account(only needs to be filled out once, then it is remembered for subsequent submissions), two are dropdown selections, one is a copied and pasted link to your app, and the last 3 are about the issue you are facing.

Adalo is an extremely useful and powerful platform that gives you as a Maker a massive amount of control over the App you are building. This is an incredible tool to have access to for $50/mo.(!!! You can build full on Native apps for $50/mo!! Think about that deeply for a moment and think back 5 years, and what it would take to achieve the same results) But that also means the way you use it is different than the way the next person uses it, and the next, and the next, and so on. This then requires that our CX team members need to understand who they are working with(email field), what the issues are related to(dropdown selections), which app you are referring to(app link, you can have multiple apps in your team), and then some basic info about your problem that you are facing(final 3 fields, title, description, and screenshots of recordings of the problem. @kmm

There are many things we can answer without having to even open an app. We have been building with Adalo for collectively longer than Adalo has existed , and have seen hundreds of ways of achieving the same thing. But is many instances, we are going to end up digging into your app at least to some extent, to be sure we are providing accurate info. It’s impossible for us to understand your unique app, built in the unique way you built it, in less than 5 mins. This is why we ask for you to describe the issue, and provide visual guidance when possible, because that reduces the time it takes for use to get you an answer to your question, and makes it more likely we get it right the first time.

When you write in a ticket, you know exactly how your app is built, exactly why you built it that way, have a mental image of the database structure, can zoom to the desired screen in 2 seconds cause you know where you put it in the editor when you made the screen. You also know exactly what fields a user needs to have set to get to where you are having a problem, and the exact route a user takes to navigate to that screen or component or action. Do you see where I am going with this?

For all of the same reasons Adalo is such a great and powerful tool, those exact same reasons make it more difficult to provide support to makers across all channels, without the info we ask for in the ticket form. We don’t plan to make Adalo less powerful, in fact the opposite is true. So that means we need to make sure we can get the info needed from each of our support requests so we are able to effectively provide the support you are requesting! We love feedback! If you believe there are better ways to capture this info when you reach out to us, we would love to hear it. We may have missed something totally obvious, and could use your help to make it clear.

At the end of the day though, our support channels are not designed for providing you with an exact solution to a question you have about how to build something in Adalo. Adalo is a self serve platform designed for you to learn and grow as a maker, and empower you to build incredible things with us. but with the number or people building and the nearly infinite ways of achieving a result, and we have a finite amount of time, we can’t give you those exact solutions, or it would mean that we are not giving other makers the responses that they also deserve.

The ticketing system we use should provide a back and forth conversation al experience where you can reply in the same thread to us, in the exact same way you do with an email. After you submit a ticket form, you can reply to the “ticket received!” message and it will stay in that same thread for us!

Please let me know if you have any additional questions. I’d also be happy to personally look into any tickets that you have submitted, and work to provide you with the information you need to move forward and get over any hurdles you are facing. I will just need the email you sent these in with. Feel free to DM me @Torrsy and @kmm with these.

Again, I apologize that we have not met this expectations, and I hope that we can take your feedback and apply it to provide a better experience in the future.

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@James_App_Maker thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Some comments from a customer’s perspective:

  1. Adalo’s mental model mapped more directly to how I’d want to build a no-code iOS app. That’s why I chose it over the others I evaluated.
  2. I’m not using Adalo for fun - I have a goal. That goal is to ship an app.
  3. In order to ship the app, three things need to happen: Adalo needs to be capable of doing the things I need, I need to know how to use Adalo, and Adalo needs to not be broken.

Here’s my perspective on those three:

  1. Adalo needs to be capable of doing the things I need:
    Adalo’s great! If it wasn’t I wouldn’t waste my time. BUt finding out capabilities or workaround can be painful. If the self-serve resources aren’t clear and community isn’t responsive, Adalo support is the last resort. Honestly the discussion volume in the forums doesn’t seem high - seems like Adalo could devote one on-staff person to reading threads and answering questions every day. That’d go a long way.

  2. I need to know how to use Adalo
    The product helps a lot w/ this. I’m a dev so none of these concepts are foreign - it’s a genuinely great experience. The self-serve resources are great too. For things that I don’t know how to do the forums would be helpful if I knew I’d get a speedy answer.

  3. Adalo needs to not be broken.
    This is where things fall over a bit. I’ve noticed two bugs that - if I was running Adalo - would be close to “showstoppers” (I’ve built and sold two B2B SaaS companies BTW so am no stranger to the challenges of scaling - it’s tough.) The edit text component doesn’t behave like a normal editing surface. And publishing didn’t work yesterday. The latter is an absolute showstopper. No amount of forum posts will help fix that if we have to raise the Bat signal to get someone from Adalo to respond.

I get why it’s desirable to have community support for a product with 200k makers, many of them non-technical and on a free plan. But I’d offer two suggestions to make the experience better for those of us who are serious about using Adalo to build apps:

  1. Charge more. Charge what you need to charge so paying customers get responses within a reasonable amount of time.

  2. Improve your support experience. I don’t mind filling out a 10q form once. But from there I should be able to have a back and forth exchange with support from my email client. It’s not clear to me today whether that’s the case. FWIW the support response from Adalo to my initial ticket gets off on the wrong foot because my original message is not quoted in the Adalo response… so any nuance about the problem is not available to me.

My 2c. Honestly I care enough about getting my problems solved that I’m contemplating upgrading to a $200/m plan for the account rep. But I’m not sure that experience will be much better. Is there an SLA on response times? The text component bug won’t be fixed if I upgrade either. I really don’t want to switch but bugs and poor support are a lethal combination.

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Thanks for the reply. FWIW I appreciate how some people may be looking for solutions. My questions were very specific issues around capabilities and bugs:

  1. Whether you can include linked text and non-linked text in a text component
  2. Whether iOS builds were working for other people
  3. Whether it was a known issue that editing inside the text component is super janky (emailed support on this)
  4. What the best way is to show a confirmation when a form has been posted

In general if you’ve got an issue supporting people you should charge more for Adalo support. People who need it (because they’re delivering an app for a client, like me) will pay for it. People who are mucking around won’t.

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I myself have also been here twice. I learned a lot more this second time around after initially teaching myself AppInstitute, Syberian… something, Knack, Bubble, Tadabase, Zoho, Webflow, Jotform, Shopify and I think some more but my mental energy is exhausted. This all after 20 years of Dreamweaver products, then Adobe products, flash / video editing, hosting, 4 website builders, business structures and on and on. I chose Adalo to invest MUCH into!

I now “only have energy left” to be a no-coder slash graphic design with one shot left and a TON of experiences. The best experiences over the 20 years of this have come from the companies that invested in real (especially chat / queue) customer service. That cannot be easy! I DO NOT ENVY ADALO DEALING WITH ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME as… building the best no-code platform of ALL those that I mentioned testing!!! I absolutely LOVE most of the platform! Buuuut…

If as a drained no-coder, feel like you may get ignored or not get a response to something you are paying for… for days and even at all in some of my cases you get a little (or a lot) ramped up in responses. Which then leads to half sentences or missing words, half thoughts, negative experiences, loss of focus, more time & ENERGY! I’d GLADLY upgrade to save what little sanity I have left!!

My case is that I am trying to build something enormous with nothing! I scrape by with a family of 4 to risk it all for all 4 of us, trying to beat the competition… again.

I have spent hundreds of hours on our app (just the version in Adalo) now and mentioned in a past post that “was ignored”… that I’m scared sarge! I’m just holding on hoping for the best!!!

With what I am building I cannot have apps not loading their data, extremely slow performance, app builder disconnecting all the time, 60 seconds to type one sentence in a property, etc. “They” won’t care, they will just move to the competitors. I’d scrape up the $200/month but I cannot do that as a trial (especially after hundreds of hours and no time left)…for nothing. If I upgrade to $200/month I’m going to be outraged and equally or not equally disrespectful if customer service just isn’t there but most importantly after I rolled the dice on a company I devoted everything to research & choose. All my eggs are now IN YOUR BASKET benny and company! Are you going to invest in customer service or did I make the wrong decision @ben1 ? I hope this does not come across as rude either, but I’ve typed and deleted MANY posts because I did not want to start getting ignored with this much at stake. I am beyond empathetic to your enormous tasks at hand

I understand MUCH but that gets me nowhere if I go live in a week and have nobody to talk to when the apps / servers are cluncky and I lose my family’s customers!

That said, GREAT WORK on the builder, creating balance in user’s options, the price point and all we can do for $50/mo!!!

Conclusion: I would love to give a more private reply (as to not disrespect by naming competitors actual details)… regarding of all the similar products that I listed and what worked best BY FAR, if you want your target market’s perspective (a no-code / non-developer). Please keep us small investors informed of customer service and performance improvements if you will. I should be launching in a week or so and I am as nervous as a whore in church!
Thanks!

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Ben, this is not happening. You told me yourself that you weren’t receiving my email replies.

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@tangerinedee I had a back and forth today with @KatelynCampbell - she replied to an email I sent to support@adalo.com. So maybe that changed. But her email didn’t contain my original message or my reply to her. So @ben1 the experience is not the exact same as email - Adalo’s ticketing system is munging the responses.

@ben1 it would be great to know what exactly the support experience is like. In Katelyn’s post on Sprucing up Support it says you won’t be checking email replies to support@adalo.com:

… it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s confusion about how to communicate with support. Some clarity would be nice.

even I had a same issue, not answered to my support request and not resolved my issue, I’m also going to stop using adalo, looking for flutter flow… or may be Glideapps…

This is a very rare occurrence that has been happening with you. It is not the normal experience for 99%+ of our tickets. It is unknown if it’s related to your specific email address, but I have not found a reason that your emails wwerecbehIving the way they were. Your emails from the other gmail account all come in fine.

We do not look at the support@ channel often. It’s a catch all for emails that come in, and an email account for our outbound requests. But we still try to keep an eye on on it for customers and will reply when we can. All of our documentation does say we want our community to use the support form. And any emails into support@ will receive a response asking you to submit a ticket through the form. It is the fastest and most effective way to receive responses from our team for all of the reasons mentioned in my above post.

Hi Torrsy,

I’ve spent the last 3 months (every single day) building a major app on Adalo which will launch within the next week. I have not found any issues as yet accept for the date picker not recognized in filter. The issue i trust would be sorted soon. Would you mind to share some of your major findings so that the rest of us try to stay clear of those elements for now while we keep an eye out for improvements. It can save some of us allot of time while Adalo attend to these issues.

For time reasons i don’t have other options or time to rebuild the app on another platform and Adalo has exceeded nearly all my expectations. So for me, I’ll be sure to stick around but would really like to avoid problematic components (if that make sense?)

Thanks for sharing though!

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I’ve been waiting for a week for a response…still nothing!

So am I to understand that in order to have the to-and-fro in order to troubleshoot a problem we’re too log a new support ticket for each response in order to ‘get your attention’?

Seems a somewhat clunky method of doing support…!

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Wow, what a hot topic this has become. I had fully intended to say my piece and leave without looking back. I thoroughly appreciate the time, effort and information that has gone into people’s replies.

While the single post isn’t definitive by any means, it certainly highlights that other community members feel the same way about the level of customer support.

I’d like to answer some of these replies as best I can (in order), so this might get a little lengthy :slight_smile:

@James_App_Maker Thanks for your reply James, I did laugh when reading your response as your first statement Says Adalo’s number one priority is support. Yet, only a couple of paragraphs down, you contradict that statement by saying Adalo support is slow to respond and sometimes gets lost with other tickets. While it may be the intention of the company to make support their number one priority, the simple fact is customers are feeling let down, and staff aren’t meeting their set priorities. If support is Adalo’s number one priority, I would expect more focus in this area, more staff dealing with support tickets.

@James_App_Maker You did raise a few points of interest. First and foremost that Adalo has only been around for a relatively short amount of time. I was under the uneducated assumption that the product had been in the market for considerably longer.

@ben1 Hi Ben. Thanks for your highly detailed and thorough reply :slight_smile: I would like to reply to a number of your points which I find interesting and informative, but this post is already going to be longer than I would care to read [HIT BY WALL OF TEXT]:slight_smile: I wasn’t aware of any support email address, and this is something I never used. All of my support enquiries have been by way of the community forum. This is the only support resource I have used or been aware of. The community forum is not the ticket system?

I agree that $50 per month for a system such as Adalo is of absolutely incredible value. The businessman in me looks at the $50 per month price tag and thinks it’s too cheap. The consumer in me looks at the $50 pricetag and jumps on it like a starving squirrel on a peanut.

I completely understand how the support channel works and the often frustrating experiences that go hand in hand. I am a small business owner working in the technology sector dealing with customers daily who can not describe the most basic trouble/problem they are experiencing. Trying to provide support to a customer who cannot clearly define their situation is an exercise I am all too familiar with.

I’m sorry my 3 paragraph reply doesn’t do your post justice. I thoroughly appreciate you taking the time to compose such a detailed and informative reply.

@appwebmobile Thanks for your reply. I’m In a similar category as you when it comes to having a finger in many pies. I’ve been in the technology sector for over 30 years, 5 of those were as a .NET developer And most recently, I’ve worked with a number of web/cloud services. While I don’t consider myself a pleb when it comes to exploring new products/services, the truth is for any new service, we all start at the zero-knowledge at ground level and work our way up.

I don’t envy your position in putting all your eggs into a single basket like that. I wish you the best, and I hope everything works out for you. I am happy to explore competitive products if they can provide an advantage to the project I’m working on. So far all of our Mobile endeavours have been developed on Glideapps and that purely comes down to the fact that it was quick and easy to do so for each product. I’m not saying that Adalo won’t inevitably do the same thing for us, but my negative experience with customer support is not conducive to growing a relationship with Adalo.

@Franna Hi Franna. The majority of my issues are not with problematic or buggy components. It is more of a personal education issue. In all fairness to Adalo, I can’t say I encountered a situation where a component was buggy. I have seen several posts where community members have voiced frustrations over buggy components, but I’m sure that’s a topic for another day :slight_smile:

While I had fully intended to throw my toys out of the cot and storm out of the room, I might have one more attempt at Adalo in the hopes of a more positive outcome.

While I don’t expect customer support to change overnight, I think there have been many posts highlighting the issues at hand. Here’s hoping Adalo can take it to heart and make a positive change.

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I only use adalo for prototyping. Its not capable of creating reliable high quality, high performance apps. Its simply too slow, too limited. No standard features like SWIP, DRAG & DROP, FOLD, VIBRATE. The notifications on my apps works only sometimes on IOS, never on ANDROID. Very bad text render engine. No way to format it nicely. Strange word breaks.No scroll box for text? rly? I really wonder where all the fundings went. The apps are not looking modern, acting modern. slideshow in a app shell. Why cant we play sound? Or animate objects? Its no witchcraft. React js has so many libaries for that.

They call adalo the canva for apps. But canva is pixel perfect. No strange layout issues like adalo has. In editor icon is perfect positioned. In ios and android I get 2 different positions… Why cant I set word within a text to bold? Or color? Why cant I use device GPS? Or record a video? Why no vibration?

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I actually disagree on many of the points above (the negative ones). Adalo has to an extent exploded in popularity, and I keep seeing and hearing about all these alternatives, Flutter Flow, GlideApps, DraftBit, AppGyver etc and the list goes on and on and on. I tried them all and most recently flutter flow, and have always come back to Adalo. Yes these platforms do have features that Adalo doesnt have, but this goes vice versa… many many tasks on these other platforms are cumbersome and not easily managed that Adalo almost does it so easily you’re left wondering - no way… really…

For example linking APIs, with RapidAPI etc is a doddle and in 3 steps you are linked and can make your app as powerful as you want.

Design flair and ability to make your app look good? That’s up to you, with custom lists, lottie files, undraw etc etc I’ve in more cases than not been able to create exactly the look and feel of an App that I wanted, including looking at larger companies like Nike, Peloton etc and have been able to replicate their design. There’s a lot of things people take for granted in Adalo that has been well and truly thought out meticulously well to allow anyone to use Adalo… Of course, there are bugs, I’ve seen them, reported them but comments like the above are just disrespectful for an all-around incredible platform.

There’s a lot of companies chasing this space, and in my humble opinion Adalo is way ahead in terms of flexibility, design and core functions I have tried and used them all. I see and hear a lot of gripes about why we can do this, and why we can’t do that… you are on a no code platform that’s not supposed (for now) to have every leading-edge tech available on Android/iOS as it comes out if you were to code in native code. This is the same for Expo and React native. You get a hell of a lot for what you pay for presented in an industry-leading platform. The positives outweigh the negatives any day. Keep pushing Adalo :clap: :clap:

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Hi Andre,

In lots of people’s vision, they see that Adalo is the canva of the no-code world for mobile apps.

Coding an app yourself is very hard for both platforms, I suggest you try it yourself, and then you’ll probably come back to Adalo after 1 hour because you have no idea how to do anything.

Also the $50 starting price is very cheap compared to Adalo’s competitors.

Also if you want to see both side by side, I suggest you watch this video. @pushingpandas

Everyone in this thread should watch it. @Tay @iAppsNi @tangerinedee

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