I find it annoyingly difficult to get new clients to adopt Glide. Unless somebody creates an app first hand they don’t seem to understand how easy it is to get started with it.
To give you some additional context, I quoted 2 hours of time to build an app for a client in the health, nutrition, and fitness space. He spent more than 1 hour to ask questions about what’s possible and what’s not.
Do we plan to create resources (videos, blogs, etc.) to educate new users (who are not developers themselves) to show what’s possible (and what’s not) with Glide? Show them how a certain Google Sheets document translates into an app? Most of the resources available already address this in parts, but this audience finds it very basic and doesn’t give them a good idea.
This could be a huge ask, but how have you managed to get somebody onboard the Glide journey?
I have redirected them to the YouTube channel, but somehow it still doesn’t give them the required confidence. I know this is not a discussion with an easy and an obvious solution.
I had been trying to find some way to keep an online database of students, with simple app or website abilities. I could never find anything that I really liked out there that was intuitive for non-technical users and easy for me to maintain. The biggest thing that impressed me with Glide was when I took a sample spreadsheet from another website’s demo app, created a new app in Glide with the sheet, and it instantly created a beautiful functioning app using the data. Since I found Glide back in March, the amount of updates and improvements to functionality has been outstanding. This is definitely a team that passionate about the work they do.
One great argument for Glide and PWA’s in general is that you can make updates instantly to the app. You don’t have to vett the changes through Apple’s or Google’s stores and you are not restricted to the store’s strict requirements.
As a user, I think I would personally be more apt to check out and use an app via a website link as opposed to installing the app. At least I get a chance to use the app and if I want to commit to it, I can easily install it to the homescreen. I’m not a big fan of installing a bunch of specialty apps, but I’ll visit a web link anytime.
Can you explain more about your goals in convincing them? What are you trying to convince them to do? Use Glide themselves? Allow you to use Glide for their projects? What are their reservations?
@david - Sorry for the delay in getting back on this.
To your first question, it’s about allowing somebody else (a developer) to use Glide for their (client’s) projects. I think everybody who has tried developing their own apps on Glide pretty much knows what is possible and what is not.
For somebody who is not developing the app themselves, they have reservations and questions around what is possible and what is not with Glide. They can refer to sample apps, but they find it tedious to check out each app on the phone browser and see what are the possibilities. Besides, regardless of how vastly different the development time is with a Glide app vs a traditional app, they expect Glide apps to be at the same level in terms of function and customization (branding, logos, multiple brand colors, images, etc.).
I feel, at a very high level, developers (us) and the platform (Glide) are now familiar with one another. It is now about introducing a third party (clients) in to the equation who is interested in getting Glide apps developed. If it helps further, the experts page on the website is positioned to help people when they’re stuck in their app development journey, and not to assess requirements from scratch and to develop apps.
A lot of this may seem all over the place. So please feel free to ask any follow up questions.
I think the key words in your post are “assess requirements”. If Glide is the only tool you know, and have to develop an app, you should know it’s capabilities as well as its limitations. For example if during your discussions to gather the clients requirements you find out that they need a good shopping card and payments section of the app, you would have to tell them that that is not in your tool box and move on to your next opportunity. But before you even get to those details you need to find out at a higher level what the client wants to accomplish. Again if it is to get direct revenue through an ordering system, then Glide, for now, won’t do it. If it is to create brand awareness and to share information about how the clients product can be utilized and or showcased, then Glide would be a fast and inexpensive solution. I think you start with what your client is wanting to accomplish and then sell him on the idea that you can come up with a quick, fast and relatively inexpensive solution using Glide. Most clients, at least small business clients, desires and wants are much bigger than their pocketbooks. You have to manage their expectations from the very beginning and guide them toward a solution you can proved them using Glide.
All this said, Glide is still a moving target when it comes to its capabilities. What you can’t do today you may be able to do tomorrow. That can be frustrating but it is what it is.
We haven’t explained this well yet, but Glide is designed for internal or private apps for businesses more than 5-star, headline App Store apps. We’re optimizing Glide for the 80% use case (80% of all apps, including internal apps for businesses, which we call ‘dark apps’) where the app is mostly concerned with presenting and manipulating data, rather than bolstering a brand or exhibiting totally new behavior.
If your client wants a simple app for work or private distribution, Glide could be the perfect fit. If they want a one-of-a-kind app in the App Store where they can totally customize the design, Glide is not suitable for that (at least for now).