I fell in love with Glide about 1 year ago so I sold my company and now am in the process of creating a purely Glide Agency. Exciting times! In the process of creating the Agency I came up with an idea on how to serve as much people as possible with Glide Apps. I think this idea is extremely BIG (the amount of value created by Glide Agencies and Glide would multiple big time) so I am sharing it here in the hope that lots of other Agencies like it and that it will be implemented in Glide.
I think if Glide would implement this feature, that Growth (both for Glide and Agencies) would become exponentially and Glide would catapulted to the forefront of No Code devolopment.
The thing I think could add a massive amount of value to Glide is if you could indicate that an app is a Master App. Every time you create a copy of that Master App (let’s name the copy Slave App), the Slave App starts with zero data in the database (maybe apart from some standard rows you marked in the Master App which should be included in each copy). Every change you make to the Master App, is also added to the Slave App. Whether you add a table, column, action, frontend page, frontend element, it’s all copied straight to all the Slave apps.
The value of this idea is huge because:
1 - Way More Glide Users: Master Apps will allow Agencies to serve a much larger customer bases (you could create SAAS-like applications). It will become much more profitable also to become a Glide Agency so the number of Agencies will also increase. Glide’s growth will become exponential as is the number of companies that can afford automations. Everyone wins.
2 - Way more value per app: when you don’t have to manually update each copy of your template anymore but rather can update one Master App, it become way more profitable to keep developing that one Master App and keep adding advanced functionality. Glide Apps will thus on average become way more advanced.
Other Master/Slave Features which would be extremely cool and keep the ‘It’s easy to change things in Glide’ vibe:
1 - ‘Branching’: you can still change small things in the Slave App which do not break the logic: for example login setting, app name, app colors. You can also add stuff on top of the Master (additional frontend pages, elements, actions, tables, even columns). Of course you can’t change or delete anything of the original Master Columns, Tables, pages etc…)
2 - ‘Deconnection’: if a customer decides he want’s to change everything, you can simpley deconnect the Slave and start editing it like a normal app. Any changes from the Master App will no langer change the App.