Hot on the heels of our announcement regarding the removal of App Actions from your subscription costs, I wanted to provide the Adalo community with a more expansive update of our ongoing efforts to improve the platform.
App Action Billing Is No More
The big news this week is that App Action overages are no longer part of your subscription expense. That’s right, you’ll never have to worry about waking up to a huge App Action bill due to unexpectedly going viral or a Fortune 500 company suddenly adopting your product. Read more about this news on our blog.
Free Plans Are Back
Free plans are back! Although I guess they never actually went away LOL. One amazing outcome from our recent engineering efforts has been the discovery of a solution for putting free databases into cold storage after a period of inactivity. This has turned out to be a far more elegant way to address the challenges associated with maintaining literally millions of app databases . So what does this mean for you?
- This means that there will not be any free database deletion event that occurs. Your apps will remain safe in Adalo
- Your unpublished apps will go into ‘cold storage’ after 60 days of inactivity. Should you wish to use this app again, it will ‘spin up’ for you in 30 seconds after you request it to.
- We will be refunding anyone who took out a Maintenance Mode plan, and refunding all money paid on those subscriptions. As a bonus, we’re also going to send those of you that took out Maintenance Mode a coupon to say thank you for sticking with us!
Firewall Calibration
At the end of January we finally seem to have fixed an elusive bug which was causing international makers to repeatedly see the yellow “Cannot connect to servers” banner when working in the Builder. This was one of those phantom issues that proved very difficult to trace but wound up being resolved by making changes to the Web Application Firewall (WAF) we use to deter the Bad Guys™ from interfering with Adalo infrastructure.Since making this change, we have seen very few new reports regarding this issue, and hope it stays that way!
Adalo Builder Improvements
Over the past several weeks we have made dozens of improvements to the builder, including removing every third-party JavaScript library that was not materially contributing to user experience. We also added several tooltips with links to documentation.We have recently been working on adding new components and component features, including most notably a new native list for social media apps and native pagination. We expect both features to be released in mid-February, stay tuned!
Experts Page Improvements
We received extensive feedback that the Adalo Experts page was in need of an overhaul. With the help of Alex at Ozonebuilds, one of the best expert teams we have, a number of fixes have been implemented–including removal of inactive experts and the implementation of a way to do a maker-rating ranking.
Speed Improvements
Our major Q4 project involved migrating the databases and moving away from an unstable infrastructure. While this move unquestionably delivered stability, we still haven’t gotten to where we want to be regarding performance. But we’re not done yet!Ongoing testing has shown where we believe the majority of apps are being slowed down. These areas include:
- App Database Performance: Optimizing each Adalo app database can be quite a challenge because while all use PostgreSQL, every database schema is different. We’ve thought a lot about this challenge and are tackling it in two ways, one of which involves bringing on a team of PostgreSQL optimization experts. More to come on this shortly.
- Component Optimization: Inefficient components, and notably custom lists, cause all sorts of app performance problems. We are presently working on this by creating more native list types, including a Social Media list type that we’ll be releasing in the very near future. We’re also working on native pagination which will bring a hugely performant alternative to infinite scrolling.
- Image Compression: We’ve long partnered with IMGIX for image-related tasks such as resizing and compression. We’ve recently made platform changes which ensure uploaded app images are further compressed by as much as 33%. You can read more about this in our recently published blog post.
Maker Education
Adalo Customer Success Advocate Kyle Belford and CTO Jason Gilmore have been having a lot of fun writing new blog posts and creating videos. They also recently hosted the first Adalo Performance Q&A live webinar, and audited two amazing Maker apps on the call and also offered other useful advice such as when to consider denormalizing your app database. Be sure to monitor our forum for more information about upcoming live events!
Also On the Roadmap
Here is a laundry list of other features we’re presently working on:
- Deep linking is being scoped out currently!
- We continue working on refactoring the plans to support add-on pricing. This has proved more difficult than expected due to some unexpected technical debt however we hope to have new plans available by the end of March. To reiterate earlier comments on this matter, no one will be force-migrated from their current plan.
- The ‘import-any-dataset-from-anything’ (DreamFactory) roll out will follow the release of new plans.
- Security upgrades to ensure we’re best-in-class.
- Finally, we’ll be rolling out some extremely exciting AI-oriented features this year!
Questions?
As always we’re happy to answer questions. Email us at support@adalo.com and we’ll make sure your question is routed to the right person.
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