On the free version it’s not an option to have emails display as anything other than anonymous. However, after I switched to the paid version, those email addresses remained anonymous. Is there anyway to update them automatically? Am I stuck with this?
If so, is there anyway to email those users? Thanks in advance for the help. I appreciate it!
I think you’re stuck with it. Somewhere inside Glide I believe they store it to map the actual user to the anonymous email, but we don’t have access to that data.
Can’t be done automatically, but you could add another column to your User Profiles table to store the actual email address, then add an email input somewhere for your users to provide their email addresses.
It would be possible to set it up in such a way that it appears as a “nag screen”, and once a user provides the info it disappears and they never see it again.
Thanks. Yeah, that’s what I figured but if I want to email them to bring them back to the app there’s no way, right? I would have to assume they came back in order for them to update the email address
Yes, I believe you’re correct there.
I had a question about this… I’ve developed an app for a client and am ready to transfer it to their team. It was developed as a free app (because it was only in development and didn’t need any Pro features yet), but the client will be upgrading to a Pro app and will need to collect real email addresses. During development, myself and multiple other users logged in to the app to test it out and, since it was free, the app anonymized the email addresses.
It seems as though (after reading the documentation and the above), that those test users are now stuck with their anonymous emails in the app. It would be great if the Glide Data Editor could take priority here and any changes that are manually made to the User Profiles sheet in the editor are respected going forward — this way, the app developer/administrator could ensure the email addresses are consistent and correct once the app goes Pro.
I think I read another thread where someone got around this by changing the Data Source to a clean version of the same Google Sheets that are used for the app. Before doing that and possibly messing something up, can anyone confirm that this is a process that has been tested and is known to work? I’m thinking that the process could be — transfer the app to client’s team, have client upgrade app to Pro and remove anonymization, make a copy of the underlying sheet, empty the new version of the sheet, change data source in the app. The hope is that new (and previous) users will log in and their real email addresses will be used.
I honestly don’t build a lot of apps for clients, but this seems like something that should work a bit better or be easier to resolve. I don’t think an app should need to start in Pro while it is being developed to mitigate this problem.
I can confirm that the process mentioned above does NOT work (at least for my app that is using Glide Tables for its User Profiles sheet).
Is there any way to edit a user’s email after the app has been upgraded to Pro?
You would probably have to allow the user to update the email, or set a condition to force them to update before proceeding. No idea how well that works though.
I’d be hesitant about wiping the user sheet. I’m sure there’s some internal tracking on glides part to track if a user is new or not, (especially since you have to also manually delete user specific data as well) so if a record is deleted, I would think it’s possible that it may not regenerate. I have never tested it though.
I’ve contacted Support on this. For my case the app is now completely empty anyway as the testing phase is over and the client wants all the data cleared out so they can start using it fresh. I’m curious how this isn’t a real issue for others… do others upgrade their app to Pro during development and prior to the sale to the client? I don’t sell a lot of apps, but this seems like a frustrating issue that makes the UX itself seem a bit clunky once the sale is completed.
It’s not something I’ve personally had to deal with. I have one Private Pro app that only has a couple of users and doesn’t anonymize emails. Most other cases, I prefer the anonymized email. I’m not in the same situation, so I can’t really give any good advice, but maybe if you are out of the initial development phase and switch to Pro, would it work to duplicate the original app and upgrade the duplicate to Pro with a cleaned out user table? I’m not sure, but I would guess that the hidden user data is not included with the duplicate, so it would be like you are starting fresh.
Hmm I’ll try the duplicate idea and see if it works next week. Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks for all that have contributed to this conversation. I’m trying this forum before connecting with support.
I’m in a similar boat in using a free app but wanting to allow people to add their work emails themselves. I have set up a user tab and on the user page I allow people / force people to update their profile. One of the options is to input their email address.
If I don’t do this, it brings over their anonymous email address. I believe they would only see their actual email address because of glide magic but I wonder: If they manually change their email address, when they log in in the future will it create a NEW profile, or does the anonymous email address know which real email address to link to?
Explaining the below images:
Karen logged in and showed up as fascinated-growth-625@anonymous.appuser.io
She proceeded to fill out her profile page upon my request and put in her professional email address
I can NOW see her professional email address as the admin when I preview as her.
I/Kevin did not do that and when I preview as I see my equable-stick-685@anonymous.appuser.io
Is this a workaround to allow users and admins to see real email addresses and will they stay linked? (All the other equable-stick-685@anonymous.appuser.io logins are me logging out and back in and it keeps my profile). I’m mainly curious if Karen logs out, will she get a new / different anonymous email address.
This is an interesting concept, for my part I never tried to edit that actual email column in case it breaks something inside Glide that we can’t change. If I absolutely need the real email then I just tell them to input it in a new column.
Have you tried this yourself?
You can always use something like mailinator.com to test with multiple temporary emails. That’s what I use to test other people’s apps without having to give out my real email address. You can also use a plus sign with gmail addresses to create separate users, but receive your pins in the same inbox.
name@gmail.com
name+1@gmail.com
name+2@gmail.com
You best bet is just to different scenarios out and see what happens.
Also, I’m not sure about the Preview As feature, but normally in a published app, a user will never see their anonymous email address in their user profile. It will actually show the email they signed in with, even though the anonymous email is what is saved to the user profile table and what is written to other tables through the email special value. Like @ThinhDinh, I haven’t ever messed around with that. I would feel more comfortable having a second email column to save the user’s real email address instead of overwriting the anonymous email column.
I can do that if necessary but would prefer not to. If there isn’t clarity on this and it becomes an issue, I’ll do that.
I did test it with my own account: changed my email address to my work one, signed out, signed in via Google, and it looks like it all lines up!
Glide Magic 🪄
Okay, I’ll set that up!
