App or Page?

Hello Glide Community,

I’m a new be in the process of making an interface for a start-up project. But thankfully there is Glide for the ones like me ;-).

Now here is the drill, I’m trying to build an employee solution to manage their flexible mobility when commuting. In essence, it’s about collecting data (trips, tickets, etc…) and creating or modifying data (declarations, corrections, etc). In a nutshell it’s about managing kilometers allowances and public transport tickets.

Here is my dilemma…

Should I opt for an App or a Page knowing that I need an employee interface, and HR dashboard, and potentially third parties to upload or retrieve data from it?

Thanks a bunch for your guidance or tips.

Best wishes, many thanks

Jules

Any feedback please?

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Probably Page

The main use would be on the move for employees, so I would develop an App for them that is designed for the mobile world.

For the administration role I would develop a second App, and I would certainly do it with Page.

This is my point of view, then perhaps we should better analyze all the processes to affirm it with certainty.

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Really it comes down to what type of device will be most often used when accessing your platform. Will it be a desktop? Then use glad pages. Will it be a mobile device? Use Glide apps.

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You have hit on a question I keep asking, too. But I haven’t gotten a solid answer. Glide Pages demo videos have shown some great features that I want for administrators to more easily move around and work on a keyboard. But I have already dedicated my domain name to a Glide App before Glide Pages existed.

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How about creating a subdomain like admin.yourdomain.com and pointing a glide app to that? or to create a second domain yourapp-admin.com if that subdomain path is not available.

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Hi again @Krisztian_Gyuris this question is off topic. Here the topic is “App or Page?”.
For your question may be was better to post a new question under this “How To” section.

Having said this.

Yes, of course it is possible to connect your app to a first or second level domain.
When you publish an app there is the possibility to define a custom domain

Please correct me on my understanding so that I can make the right start:

A mobile app has the option to open in tablet mode by default. That implies all the features in the app will work normally in a tablet.

On the other hand the pages can adjust automatically to fit into a tablet screen. And being a new addition to Glide, Pages contains more options to add actions for the desktop mode. So if I start with Pages my tablet app may contain actions that can’t be done in the phone mode.

So if when starting the project I have a tablet in mind, should I start the project as an app or as pages to get the most benefits while retaining the flexibilities?

If I start by using pages for a tablet which then contains features not workable in a mobile app, then later want to make a phone app, how can I make duplicate and adapt without creating it from scratch?

At things exist now, whether you start with an App or Page, if you want to develop for the other, you are able to use the same data, but everything else needs to be recreated from scratch (you do have the option to “build pages from data”, but it’s going to be basic pages and not have any of the features you worked so hard to put into the app).

And according to a recent chain I read, if you add any computed columns to the data in the App or Page, those computed columns need to be also added to the other app or page. Columns that are data would appear in either.

I’d say there should be two main considerations.

The first consideration would be are most of your users likely to be accessing your App/Page on mobile, or on desktop/laptop? If mobile, then I’d lean towards an App, otherwise a Pages Project.

The second consideration is feature set. Pages are relatively new, and do not support as many features as Apps (although they are rapidly catching up). There are also some mobile specific features such as barcode scanning and signature capture that might never be available in Pages. So you should carefully consider which features you are likely to need before deciding one way or the other.

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Thanks for the quick reply. I was comparing mobile phone and tablet not desktop but your comment about Barcode scanning and signature capture is a useful pointer.