Hello everyone. My name is John. Same as my username. I’m in Los Angeles. I work in the entertainment industry, and I’m currently using Glide to build a rapid prototype for a product I’ve been developing on paper for some time. In the month I’ve been using this product, I’ve gotten hooked. I expected to use the free version to build a proof of concept and then move on to native app development. But tonight I became a pro-glider. I dig the community here. And while I will likely have to move this particular prototype to something native, I feel that I’ve gotten pretty good with this platform (spreadsheets for sure) and want to build more here. Anyway… just wanted to introduce myself, since I’ve been lurking for a while, replying and asking questions, etc.
I’m also using Glide for the purposes of prototype testing. I’m surprised that Glide doesn’t market this more towards the UX and design communities who are mostly using products like InVision or Marvel which offer limited interactions.
While Glide has a lot of design limitations, it’s a great way to collect feedback on concepts where you need people to interact with a product over a period of time in order for them to understand the experience and provide meaningful feedback.
I’m currently building a prototype for a career coaching app. We’re not testing the design of the app but rather the role that an app can play in facilitating a relationship between a career coach and a worker. To that end, having a fully interactive prototype, even if the features are limited, is far more valuable than a perfectly designed prototype made with InVision or Marvel.
But I think Glide’s vision is an apps ecosystem with a catalog of amazing apps created by “the people” that rival the kind of stuff you can find on the app stores of the big boys. Especially since the lions share of apps downloaded from apple are not conceptually complex.
The problem is scaling a userbase on a Glide app. From my understanding, the 25k rows of data provided with a pro plan is not a limit by Glide, but rather a limitation of the software. Apparently at 25k rows of sheets data, you start hitting bottlenecks. If any Glide apps take off, this would almost certainly doom their life on this platform.
Example: the Finstagram app. Let’s say some Instagram influencer used it to build their own alternative to Instagram. Some influencers have well over 1M followers on Instagram. Just the user sheet alone for such an app could cross the 25k threshold. But what if even a tiny fraction of people started using this influencer’s Finstagram? Even just 1000 of them, say. All it would take is each of them uploading 25 posts and they’d hit that limit.
Add to that the fact that currently, the only technique for giving users access to edit individual posts they wrote without giving them access to edit other people’s posts is to use a QUERY formula in sheets to duplicate your content-sheet for a public non-editable version vs a private per-user editable version. Such a technique (I believe) would get you to that 25k in half the time since every content submission is two rows of data.
All that said, this platform is young. So much promise. Such passionate and talented developers. I’d put my money on them figuring a lot of this out.
