Hey Jeff, thanks for the suggestion, and sharing your concepts. I tried that early on, but for my purposes it doesn’t really work (or if it did, it’s not very intuitive feeling)
On my Admin app, I have 3 tabs:
“Settings”, which has a Privacy & Security message, a Text Edit component for a single text string that is used in many other parts of the app, 2 Relations and 2 other list-relations.
“Database”, with Add/Edit/Delete rights and a search/sort function.
“Attendance”, which allows a certain admin user to add attendance numbers and dates.
“Export/Backup”, which has multiple buttons for exporting schedules as PDF or CSV.
Each of those tabs is almost an app unto itself, with multiple levels of data.
So for me to create email lists and list relations for each of those sheets, with multiple admin users with different permission levels, seems to be a really long way around a short problem that could be solved with a single whitelist to hide/show each tab in the Menu.
Not to mention it would have a cleaner UI by eliminating these tabs or menu items that are of no use to 90% of the users.
Plus, as Marty mentioned above, this tab whitelisting would be helpful in other ways where it makes more sense to hide a whole tab rather than just lists within a tab. This opens up a lot of potential for design customization by the Developer. For example, beyond just Admins, we could put the customization in the User’s hands by creating a “Show/Hide” menu item to let ALL users decide which tabs they want to see using Switch components for each optional tab. (Use example: A Sports complex has Baseball, Football, Basketball, Volleyball and Soccer, and has schedules, team lists, etc. for each sport. Every sport could have its own tab, and the user could hide the sports he’s not interested in, simplifying the UX. This would be a nice feature to include with the Onboarding concept you’re working on.
This will also solve another niche issue for those who have a separate Admin (or other) app, wherein if you have multiple apps for the same sheet, there is no way to copy more than one app to another account. (IE if I wanted to share my Admin and User apps that link to a single sheet, you could only copy one of them…if you copy them both it would create separate copies of the Google Sheet, and the data would not be linked).
Long story short, I think adding a per-tab privacy feature will be an elegant and intuitive way to solve a lot of issues and open up design options, and hopefully we can get enough Likes on this thread to gain some traction with the Development team!