Linking Apps

I’ve been using Glide to make internal apps for our company (publisher/IP incubator) and our work is so complex that it’s made sense to build these as separate apps that share some core Glide tables.

I have a CRM for our adaptation department, a marketing department app, an app for our writer/creators, and a task management app.

The people on the leadership team use all of these and are asking to have it ALL on one mega app. I’m wondering if it will ever be possible to have apps interlink where I can create a menu at the top of all and have the links open in the same window? Then I can keep the data and apps separate, but access them easily from the same page.

Or does it make sense to build it as one app?

I’d build it as one app, define roles, and control which part of the app is visible to which group of users :slight_smile:

Glide doesn’t have a native feature where you could have an umbrella app to group other apps, but you might be able to build this out yourself. After all each of your separate apps is but a website. The home screen of your app could be a menu that links to the different apps. The issue with this idea is that you couldn’t navigate to the different apps via the native navigation bar, you would have to do it via an on-screen menu, so you would have more clicks than necessary.

I’ve been down this path, and my advice is to keep the Apps separate and use shared tables where it makes sense to do so. The problem with the “mega-App” approach is that you eventually reach a point where it becomes too big and unwieldy and a nightmare to manage and maintain.

If you’re on a Business or Enterprise plan, you have the option of iFrame embedding, so one option is to create one App as a “wrapper” for all your other Apps. This is what I’ve done, and it works well.

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Actually, you can.
You just setup each tab with a web embed, and add the URL of each of the other Apps.
I know this works, because I’ve done it :wink:
The only issue is that the first time a user navigates to each tab they’ll have to login to the embedded App - but only the first time, so it’s not a huge issue.

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Oh yes good idea, I hadn’t thought of web embeds. I’m not a huge fan of embedding because it often looks weird, but if it’s done carefully – and apparently you’ve done it Darren – then that would make things much easier than rebuilding.

I love this idea! Thanks!

I do have a Business Plan so I should be able to embed. I think I tried putting an app link in the iFrame element before and it didn’t work, is there something special I need to do with the link to make it work?

Yes, you need to contact Glide Support and ask them to enable it.
Give them the App IDs of each App that you want to embed.

Awesome! Thank you so much Darren, this is a great solution.

You could use an html - apk converter to link all the app links into one main app.

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