Developer Mode

Hi,

How i can make tests in app without my customers don’t receive content in tests ?

Is possible turn on “developer mode” while make and play new formats and tests before that send updates for my customers ?

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Hey Frisone! What you can do is to make a copy of the app, and in this new app you test the new content, and after it’s done, you change the url.glideapps.io of your older one, and change the new one to the older url

So that, you can test without your clients see what it’s happen

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We are talking about technology, a modern environment, innovations and having to juggle to be able to test an application and have to make copies of it and have the rework to do it again is unnecessary. I believe that this should already be created.

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The main problem with this is the direct connection to a sheet. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to have a development copy or mode, but you have to be careful if you start making structure changes to the sheet and the user has to be made well aware that they need to be extra careful when making sheet changes. The Glide team is aware of this and most likely working on a solution, but have a lot of different scenarios to consider. I’m guessing this would be a considerable rewrite of their system logic. They’re only a year old. They’ll have it in due time. They have a lot of feature requests to work through with a small team.

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I’m thinking about this scenario but unsure as to what’s going to be the behavior for current users.

Let’s say that I am user X. I have the old app with the name url1.glideapps.io.

Then I as the admin of the app am going to make these steps:

  1. change the domain of the old app to dontuse.glideapps.io.
  2. release a new app with the old domain name url1.glideapps.io

Will user X have the new app without re-installing?
Is the app going to stop working for him?

Wouldn’t hurt to try it with a couple of test apps. Worst case, they may need to sign in again, but I think it should work without them having to reinstall.

It would be great to have a development and production environment but I can appreciate the level of effort to implement that functionality. I haven’t released my app yet but I am already dreading making changes to a live app with users :grimacing:

The new glide sheets feature tells me that they are taking the steps needed to have more control over customer databases. I think it was smart to bootstrap glide with google sheets but as the platform gets more complex it’s not really a long term solution. Especially if you are going to move to native apps!

I have tried this before and noticed a few things:

  • In case you change the app icon, it wouldn’t change on your phone if you installed it previously.
  • Users will have to re-login to access the new app.
  • Users will not need to reinstall the app though but sometimes there’s a slight downtime when you do the transition for the domain to kick in, so if users open the app during that time, they end up with the cached version or a blank screen

You can give it a try too.
Instead of doing this though, the best practice I now use to achieve the same functionality is to use tab visibility. I create a new tab which is visible only to my email and create the changes/upgrades there and as soon as it’s ready to launch, I change the tab visibility.

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Thanks for the tips.

Manan - I like your suggestion.

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