🏛 Town Hall - March 2022

[jessehaywood]

- YouTube

Checkout our March 2022 Town Hall!

We discussed:

• The no-code space
• The vision of Adalo
• Our short and long term roadmap of features for 2022
• Component Marketplace 2.0
• Location features
• Versioning
• Performance
• Web apps
• Project “Ready-Made”
• Adalo App Academy
• Experts and freelancers
• Pricing

There’s a lot there!

David has opened up his calendar for about 20 people to schedule a call with him. Watch until the end for his purpose behind that. You can get on his schedule at this link: Calendly - David Adkin

I am planning on doing some more of these, so if we didn’t get to your question, please share it the next time I post.

Thanks y’all!

[James_App_Maker]

Looks nice!

[Briggsy]

Thanks for getting this out!

[iAppsNi]

Awesome guys. Look forward to watching this tomorrow

[Flawless]

After watching the video, it’s still unclear how the communication will be about what’s in the works, what we can expect, and when we can expect them. Sounds like things will just be announced on the changelog when they’re ready. The 6-week chunks sound like a great idea, as long as you keep us users in the loop of what’s going on.

Will you be announcing the things that are being worked on with estimated completion dates?

Based on what I heard, the address/geolocation features will be the first new feature to be released ‘sometime before summer’ but that’s very vague.

Will the address/geolocation features be free for all users, free for monthly subscribers, or will they be a paid upgrade to use like the marketplace release?

My absolute biggest concerns with Adalo are:

• Without the ability to link to specific screens on a web app, it forces the users to start from the home screens and manually navigate to the screens we want them to go to. This was very very briefly talked about but not really given any detail at all.
• Without the ability to grab all records from within nested arrays, a lot of external APIs are unable to be used with Adalo.

Specific examples: Google maps (can’t grab all parameters of an address since we have no estimated timeframe on when we can have addresses in Adalo or if it’ll even be free). Woocommerce products (can’t grab product variations). Printful products (can’t grab all product variations).

Here’s what I feel is the order of priority Adalo should focus on:

1. Address/location features
2. Web app links to specific screens.
3. Versioning sounds like a good idea.
4. API enhancements (for nested arrays)

These sound like a waste of time and resources when focus should be on the platform:
Project ready-made
Adalo app academy

I would recommend not using any current resources for project ready-made and the app academy. Please hire someone else to take care of those so that y’all can focus on the platform.

[jessehaywood]

I think what was said regarding communication is that we won’t be announcing specific dates right now. That hasn’t served us, or our community, well in the past so it’s something we are moving forward with. Maybe sometime down the road we can broadcast more specific dates, but not now. Instead, you will know what our “Big Rocks” are. Our 6 week sprints consist of work toward those Big Rocks (David is writing a blog post that will go more into detail about this). Depending on the Big Rock, sometimes things will ship after those short cycles, and sometimes they will ship all at once. For instance, I have seen all of the location features “shipped” behind the flag. They aren’t publicly available yet, but they’ve “shipped” in the sense that the six week cycle is up and they completed that specific project for that particular feature related to location. Once we launch location, all of those things will be available. But that will work differently depending on the different Big Rock. Web App upgrades won’t be launched all at once, but will likely be updated after those shorter cycles.

Yes, location will be the first to release. He said it should be released in “weeks not months”. It’s really close, but we aren’t putting a date to it because we aren’t going to launch it premature, or have to tell our community that we haven’t hit our arbitrary date we picked. Nonetheless, it’s coming soon.

I don’t feel like I can speak to your pricing question about geolocation. It appears that they are baking it into the system like visibility, actions, etc. But that’s why we gave the link. I recommend scheduling a call with David and asking him that question yourself about geolocation. That would be something he would really like to hear your opinion about. He could probably answer your other questions about geolocation too.

Can you elaborate more on your two concerns about web apps and nested arrays and maybe form some of your thoughts into questions? I’ll see what I can do about finding an answer.

Your priorities are aligned with our priorities, for the most part. Geolocation is coming first, then versioning (it’s more popular at ideas.adalo.com than web), then web apps, and API enhancements will be addressed in project ready made.

In regard to the app academy, no developers are working on that, so our developers aren’t “wasting time” on the app academy. It’s primarily our education and community team: Patrick (who makes our educational material and updates our help documentation), me, and our Partnership Director Barrett. None of us can work on location, performance, versioning, or anything that involves any type of development.

Again, David has opened up his schedule, and I recommend sharing some of these thoughts with him. Calendly - David Adkin

Edit: I should have used the quote feature sorry. I hope you could follow along with what I was responding to.

[Toddy]

Thank you both for getting this talk published

Thoughts:

• @Flawless put out a priority list. I agree the contents. However, my thoughts on edu & academy differ. (below)

• Didn’t hear much about core features. example: a better text editor, alignment tools, etc… simple basic every app / every screen things.

• I think core features & Adalo builders’ end user speed are the most important… or most lagging areas.

• I think your vision for Adalo education is very very broad. too broad. Meaning, I hope most of the focus of Adalo edu is on HOW to use Adalo. Not UX/UI, Not business advice, not how to run an agency, blah blah. perhaps much later.

Instead, stick to learning Adalo. how to work with APIs, webhooks, theory, organization, components, give me a tour… what should I be thinking about, where is Adalo weak, how does Adalo think, what NOT to do, common mistakes, common bugs, how to deal with them etc. Focus on Adalo & services used with them.

reference: 1. If I watch a pragma flow component video… I am a bit lost… confident, but lost, like I never got the orientation… don’t know how to describe it…other than, there are some gaps in understanding. hard to follow them at the moment. … Even though, they look well done, organized… my fault. not Pragma flows. 2. If I watch an Adalo tutorial video… I feel like I am following / copying it; not learning. … someone is catching the fish for me, I am not learning to fish. I want to learn to fish. hope that makes sense.

• Ready-made: Not against them. But, I think there are definite pluses and minuses. The current ready-made buttons are fast and easy, but they suck because they aren’t flexible… same goes for lists. Perhaps more flexibility, or ready made PWA email notifications, or maps, etc… depends on the learning curve of not using ready made stuff. so, I’m indifferent. might be nice. maybe not.

[anon28807528]

Really well done @jessehaywood.
Your role is incredibly valuable for all of us and a post like this proves that.

[jessehaywood]

Thanks for your input Toddy.

@Toddy

Didn’t hear much about core features . example: a better text editor, alignment tools, etc… simple basic every app / every screen things.

Yes, David alluded to that. We won’t be focusing on performance of the builder, but will prioritize performance for the end user first (faster list loading, etc). After we drastically improve performance there, we will move on to performance in other areas, like many of the things you mentioned.

@Toddy

I think core features & Adalo builders’ end user speed are the most important

Agreed. End user will be our first priority for performance. I can’t speak to what will be next, but I’m sure we will value our communities input there.

@Toddy

I think your vision for Adalo education is very very broad .

I knew you’d bring up the App Academy! haha. As to Adalo education, (this is hypoethitical, idk #'s off the top of my head) if there are 50 videos, 35 or more will be on actually building in Adalo. We just want to equip our Experts and Freelancers as well, and that’s the primary reason we are going to be creating and aggregating course material on other aspects of business. They are extremely important to the future of Adalo, too. But I appreciate your input on that.

@Toddy

Ready-made: Not against them. But

I think the “ready-made” project is very broad and will be highly driven by our communities needs. For instance, Flawless mentioned API enhancements. If that’s valued by a lot of people in our community, then that will be a major focus of ready-made.

[jessehaywood]

Thanks man!

[Toddy]

Thank you for the follow up. Love your accent…lol… haven’t heard it, nor farming analogies in a long while. refreshing;) Keep up the great work.

[pushingpandas]

Really great Town Hall @jessehaywood . You should really do this more regularly. Maybe quarterly? It’s good to keep the community informed and motivated. Thank you for your efforts.Regarding updates. I think it’s important for the outside world to see a steady flow of upgrades, updates. So people see the developer activity on the platform.

I think it’s important to update the editor as well. It’s a pita to pixel perfect position stuff. I am not sure why it is but it shouldn’t be necessary to add additional rectangles everywhere just to keep things where they belong to. Every additional item on-screen lowers the performance. Maybe Adalo need to go away from the “free positioning” concept and use a stack positioning like glide or appgyver does. The apps would be optical cleaner and maybe the performance would benefit from it too.

Oh and what is up with the subscription component Inapp? Its in beta but no new mention about it. The focus shift now to gps component. Any update regarding the subscription or is it canceled?

[msmurfitt]

Thanks for update @jessehaywood, appreciate it.
Adalo communication is way better since you got involved (still room for improvement, obviously), but, good job!

[jessehaywood]

Go sign up and share some of your thoughts with David!

Thanks for the input on frequency. I think quarterly makes sense, too.

Hopefully the changelog will show that there is a steady flow of upgrades, updates, etc. Like he said, we have TAG time, which is four hours each week that we can work on whatever we want outside the Big Rock. A lot of those minor tweaks and fixes come from that time.

Regarding subscription, I’m not sure about that. I haven’t asked, but I can look into it. I know it’s still in beta. There is a private slack group of users who are testing it. I’ve seen @anon28807528 and @theadaloguy in the group. They honestly may know more than me at the moment, but I’m still gonna ask about it.

[jessehaywood]

Thank you. How else do you think we can improve communication? I’m always open to learn here.

[theadaloguy]

Still in Beta yes, I have recently set it up successfully but I do have unanswered questions and it was a fairly tedious thing to setup. Would be great if Adalo streamlined it and could bring it out of beta. For now I think the average users might struggle with the beta. I was in and out of Apple and Google documentation a lot.

[jessehaywood]

Good to know. I’ll try to get a status on that.

[theadaloguy]

@pushingpandas

I think it’s important to update the editor as well. It’s a pita to pixel perfect position stuff. I am not sure why it is but it shouldn’t be necessary to add additional rectangles everywhere just to keep things where they belong to.

Great point. If we can make layouts more consistent and intuitive, the time saved building apps would be huge. And fixing the age old tab bar issue on certain devices. A couple of basics that would really improve the Adalo experience.

[anon28807528]

I was never able to get it to work in Test Flight after following the instructions “to a T”.
I’m probably going to hire someone who’s done this to help see me through.

[paulh]

Thanks Jesse and David! This was a good first town hall, some good high-level info and I’m sure you’ll find your groove as you do more of them.

One suggestion would be to include some more tactical advice/answers to specific questions. I know you’re doing the training videos, but I think it might be useful to respond to some of the more popular support forum questions with a dev or support person (I think I brought this up previously, but Draftbit does great office hours).

Also in the future, perhaps add time code of the topics in the description so if there’s one particular area that someone is interested in, they can go straight to that part.