For context, Glide launched in mid to late 2019 (I believe) and grew a lot in 2020 and 2021. The company is recent but the team has a strong track record. The feature releases in the past two years have been mind blowing. But not all is rose: the platform can a little buggy at times and building has become slightly less user-friendly than it might have been. The trade-off has been more power, more features. It is a difficult balance to strike. According to the CEO of Glide, 2022 will be spent reinforcing Glide’s foundations: simplicity, user-friendliness, fun.
Note that Glide recently closed a round of funding, so the team should be expanding and giving themselves the means to fix bugs, simplify, etc.
In the best of worlds, the bugs in the product would be so rare, and the product so easy to use, that support would barely be needed. The community forum is here, however, so we can help one another collectively.
It’s a valid question. There are many other solutions out there and they all have their pros and cons. Glide is by no means perfect but it aims to cater to a certain market (type of user) for certain use cases. Do you fit the ideal Glide user and are you aiming to build what Glide can tackle? Might other platforms be more suitable? You can ask in the forum if you are unsure.
The whole point of Glide is to allow non-experts to build their web and mobile apps. In fact, in my view, it’s still one of the weaknesses of Glide: too many great things are being built by developers that have great Glide skills.
(Maybe this is not surprising: most Word documents, Powerpoint presentations or Excel sheets, for instance, are not great.)
I feel like a Glide developer might follow the following learning curve:
- Beginners can built good looking, basic apps with little to no learning curve (+++).
- As soon as the app is beyond basic, building features can become difficult. At the very least muddy and messy. The tinkering starts. Is this the case with other platforms? I don’t know, I only use Glide (+/-)
- Finally, advanced users can build incredible features by pushing the limits of the platform. And here lies both a strength and a weakness: sure such and such feature is doable, but it often is not that simple (yet), involves workarounds right and left, and a lot of effort. (+ for advanced users)
As mentioned above, Glide is working hard to simplify things, and the team has proven time and time again that it delivers and never disappoints.
A response I wrote a while back: Glide vs. competition