Lots of exciting announcements today on the Airtable Platform! For more information specifically about how this launch impacts developers - including updates to the Blocks SDK and how to submit an app to the marketplace - check out our post here.
We’ll be hosting a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in this thread on Thursday 9/17 at 10am PT, where a number of folks from our platform engineering team will be online to answer any developer-focused questions you might have related to building Apps and submitting to the Marketplace.
Feel free to begin posting questions here in advance! We’ll do our best to get to everything we can on Thursday.
See you there!
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We’d like to second that. While Airtable might not get involved with the billing infrastructure, it would be helpful to allow us, authors, to make it clear for potential buyers what plans the app offers, and what each plan might cost.
Eg. Free - x features n/month - x+y features
In the shorter-term, if you do choose to charge for your app off-platform, feel free to include this information directly in the app description on the marketplace.
When you submit an app to the marketplace, you also include a bunch of metadata including a description - which would be a perfect place for this information.
Would Airtable be interested in buying the rights to an app for inclusion in the Marketplace?
I can imagine a scenario where a developer won’t want to set up a payment system to charge users, dealing with authenticated “active plans”, etc in order to distribute their blocks.
As an alternative, if Airtable bought the rights to, or established a “bounty” for, the best of the best of Custom Apps. That may relieve some of the headache for small-time devs like myself.
Will there be a “developer portal”?
I can imagine in the top bar next to “(My) Bases” there would be a “(My) Apps” where developers can manage the apps (title, description, icon, etc.) they’ve made, whether they’ve been submitted to the Marketplace or not. Ideally, you’d be able to see/update the code for the app there as well. As it stands, there’s not easy way for us to see all the apps we’ve made in one space.
It would be an absolute DREAM if from there, you could use something akin to the “Base Invite” functionality to invite users to be able to use an App, making it available for them in their Apps Library. Much like inviting someone to a base or workspace, you may have the ability to remove someone’s access.
Will the Marketplace feature “developer profiles” similar to user profiles on the Universe?
It would be useful to “follow” your favorite developers, especially if they’ve released more than one app
It would also be great to include tags for apps, similar to base tags on the Universe
This is definitely something we’re also interested in exploring. Our first version of this was the Blocks Contest, which we were super excited about how it turned out.
We anticipate in the near future having some version of more contests, direct “app bounties” (where we specify a use-case in advance), or even something like selectively granting the top X apps a certain reward.
Would be super interested to hear from everyone how much interest there would be in participating in something like this! We’d love to get your feedback and ideas around app incentives in general here: https://airtable.com/shrFQkYXTVzLkwgEY
Submitting a block by running block submit without any other prior contact or registration feels emotionally odd to me.
While I understand that a block/app should be as polished as possible before submitting it, if Airtable finds issues, what is the review process for correcting those issues?
About how long can developers expect it to take from block submit to the block appearing in the marketplace?
Anyone can sign up for developer access to the custom apps platform! You can sign up for developer access through this form.
When getting started, we recommend following the guides on our developer docs site to get the ball rolling. Once you have an app that’s ready for publishing, you can follow the steps in Submitting your app to the Airtable Marketplace to send it up for review.
The TLDR for submitting is that there’s now a block submit feature built into the latest version of our @airtable/blocks-cli tool.
How can I tell if I’ve already filled out this form or not? Lol, I feel like I’ve filled out a zillion forms for Airtable signing up for different things.
If I’m right sharing blocks with a 3rd party meant that you had to give access to the entire database. Is that with Marketplace any different? It would be great to create an app, and only have this app accessible for a 3rd party.
Regards,
André
Hi Andre, thanks for the question!
When you publish an app to the Marketplace, anyone on Airtable can then install it - no input from the developer required, and no need to share the base. That said, the app itself does have access to the entire base & all data in it. We’re carefully reviewing each submission to the Marketplace though to make sure that that data access isn’t misused.
Would Airtable be interested in buying the rights to an app for inclusion in the Marketplace?
I can imagine a scenario where a developer won’t want to set up a payment system to charge users, dealing with authenticated “active plans”, etc in order to distribute their blocks.
As an alternative, if Airtable bought the rights to, or established a “bounty” for, the best of the best of Custom Apps. That may relieve some of the headache for small-time devs like myself.
Will there be a “developer portal”?
I can imagine in the top bar next to “(My) Bases” there would be a “(My) Apps” where developers can manage the apps (title, description, icon, etc.) they’ve made, whether they’ve been submitted to the Marketplace or not. Ideally, you’d be able to see/update the code for the app there as well. As it stands, there’s not easy way for us to see all the apps we’ve made in one space.
It would be an absolute DREAM if from there, you could use something akin to the “Base Invite” functionality to invite users to be able to use an App, making it available for them in their Apps Library. Much like inviting someone to a base or workspace, you may have the ability to remove someone’s access.
Will the Marketplace feature “developer profiles” similar to user profiles on the Universe?
It would be useful to “follow” your favorite developers, especially if they’ve released more than one app
It would also be great to include tags for apps, similar to base tags on the Universe
(We’ll be replying to the questions here separately - here’s the answer for #2!)
Hi Kamille,
Great question - these things (management of your custom apps & making it easier to collaborate on custom apps with other users) are on our radar and we plan to start tackling this soon.
More broadly, this is related to the anticipated major changes around remotes mentioned in our announcement. We plan to improve several aspects of “how apps work” that are more related to the in-Airtable experience of managing and using your custom apps (rather than the developer tooling).
These details are subject to change as we work on it, but this is the current, high-level plan:
Add some form of “My Apps” like you mentioned, where you can see your apps and view details about each one.
This will replace the current “remotes” feature - instead of having to create a new custom block in each base you want to use it & keep each remote updated, you’ll be able to install that one app between multiple bases.
You will also be able to list your app on the marketplace from here & manage your listing.
Add some form of “app collaborators”, where you can add other users to your app. In the future, this could also include different permission levels (e.g. being able to develop the app, or just install it.).
Two caveats:
These features require major foundational improvements and redesigns, so this is a longer term project - we can’t share any sort of timeline at the moment.
Since this is a larger project, we don’t have specifics on what exact features will be included, etc at this point in time. However, feedback from the community on what they’d like to see here is useful and we’ll definitely keep it in mind. We’ll also explore ways to get early feedback from developers on this new experience when we’re later in development.
This is also on our radar. In the short term, we’ll send out regular reports with metrics to developers who have listed an app on the marketplace. In the longer term, we’re thinking about ways to give developers access to these metrics directly (likely via the a developer portal of sorts like you mentioned.)
Along the lines of @Kamille_Parks’s questions, I think I just don’t understand what incentive I have, as an independent developer, to build and maintain Apps in Airtable’s Marketplace.
I will certainly be developing Apps for myself. I have some inkling of desire to share some of the Apps I build with others, for their general benefit.
What I don’t have is a desire to receive a flood of incoming email from people I don’t know asking me for upgrades, bug fixes, improvements/enhancements, technical support on an App I decided, out of the goodness of my heart, to share with the world – and especially when there is absolutely no economic incentive for me to do so.
Marketplace seems like it makes a lot of sense for established companies that have a web service with an API. They have an incentive to publish an App on Airtable’s Marketplace for free, to move users towards their service and offer a desirable integration.
But I just don’t see how this makes sense for someone like me - a casual, independent developer. I work hard in my free time to develop quality Apps that I think others can benefit from. My reward for publishing these in Airtable’s Marketplace is that, if I want to benefit economically from this, I have to set up any payment processing and information gathering myself, and have no way to really police the use of my app; and in addition, I am on the hook to receive and respond to any manner of feedback regarding my App.
The economic incentive just isn’t there. I had imagined, as Custom Block’s beta began and was rolling along, that Airtable was targeting individual developers, “Makers” and “DIYers” if you will, with the platform. But it looks like they are targeting companies providing a web service that have an economic incentive just by having incoming traffic to their API’s and services. This is fine - it’s a valid direction to go - it’s just a little disappointing to someone like me.
Really important question, thanks for surfacing this.
One thing will always be true - we also want to continue to support the “Makers” and “DIYers” in a first-class way. Partially selfishly, since we’re “Makers” and “DIYers” ourselves on the team, and would never want to feel like the Airtable platform is only a place for enterprises and businesses to play. Along these lines, we’ll always be prioritizing being able to build apps just for yourself, having a quick getting-started process, a seamless developer experience, not having to wrangle a bunch of boilerplate and infrastructure, etc.
I take your question in sort of two ways - hopefully one of these catches it:
Would like a better way to monetize as an “indie” developer. Totally understand the effort & annoyance involved in having to roll your own payment system in order to see any monetary benefit from these apps. We’re very keen on supporting a much more seamless monetization system for app developers - would love to get everyone’s feedback here Register your interest for monetizing apps on the Airtable Marketplace
Would like a better way to distribute apps for free without the overhead of needing to provide support, bugfixes, etc. Totally understand this one as well. Right now, just since the app platform is so new, we’re being conservative when it comes to having apps thoroughly reviewed & supported before including them in the marketplace. Right now the best “ad hoc” way to distribute your app is to open-source it and have potential users follow these instructions to install it in their base, though we recognize this process isn’t very non-developer-friendly. We’re also intently exploring ways to make this process more seamless - perhaps something like an “unverified” app section in the Marketplace, or a faster way to install an open-source app. Our top priority here will always be to ensure that Airtable users’ data will be secure and nothing unexpected will happen, but we definitely want to trend towards making app distribution overall more open.
Does Airtable have plans for a developers partner program?
We don’t yet have a formalized developer partner program, though this is something we’re also exploring.
Would love to learn a little more about what you’d like to see as part of a developer partner program?
Here are a few questions:
Has Airtable come out with best practices for storing and displaying sensitive data such as API keys in a custom app?
The Developer policy states that apps may not use unpublished APIs. What about an internal unpublished APIs that the developer has created specifically to interact with Airtable but does not want the public using?
The Developer policy states that apps must function on the desktop version and all supported browsers. It is not realistic for independent developers to actually test all of those scenarios. What do you consider to be a reasonable amount of testing for an independent developer?
The Developer policy states that apps may not “[d]isplay advertising or promotional content beyond your (or your organization’s) name and logo” Does this mean that we cannot include even a website in the app itself?
How can a Developer remove an app from the marketplace if the developer no longer wants the app to be available?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide customer assistance? Are we allowed to charge for customer support?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide bug fixes in a timely manner? What if the “bugs” are in a 3rd party library that the developer uses?
What are the consequences for failing to provide timely assistance/bug fixes? What notice will you give developers if they are not in compliance? Will you give developers any assistance?
How will Airtable determine if there are user issues, since developers must provide contact information? (Presumably users would be contacting the developer directly.)
Will there be an in-marketplace method for obtaining feedback from users? For example, will there be a rating/review system put in place?
Hi Kuovonne! Thanks for all these excellent questions! We’ll post our answers in a few different replies.
We don’t have a good story here at the moment. We’re very much aware that this is a problem though, and have been thinking about how we can better solve this issue.
Right now, my suggestion would be to refer to what Airtable’s own apps do for storing API keys - typically, that means storing it in globalConfig , including it in a password field in a form. There’s a a big issue with that though - that API key will be accessible to anyone who has read/write access to the base. Because of that, you should include a strong disclaimer in your block UI explaining those issues to the user to help them make an informed decision.
Would Airtable be interested in buying the rights to an app for inclusion in the Marketplace?
I can imagine a scenario where a developer won’t want to set up a payment system to charge users, dealing with authenticated “active plans”, etc in order to distribute their blocks.
As an alternative, if Airtable bought the rights to, or established a “bounty” for, the best of the best of Custom Apps. That may relieve some of the headache for small-time devs like myself.
Will there be a “developer portal”?
I can imagine in the top bar next to “(My) Bases” there would be a “(My) Apps” where developers can manage the apps (title, description, icon, etc.) they’ve made, whether they’ve been submitted to the Marketplace or not. Ideally, you’d be able to see/update the code for the app there as well. As it stands, there’s not easy way for us to see all the apps we’ve made in one space.
It would be an absolute DREAM if from there, you could use something akin to the “Base Invite” functionality to invite users to be able to use an App, making it available for them in their Apps Library. Much like inviting someone to a base or workspace, you may have the ability to remove someone’s access.
Will the Marketplace feature “developer profiles” similar to user profiles on the Universe?
It would be useful to “follow” your favorite developers, especially if they’ve released more than one app
It would also be great to include tags for apps, similar to base tags on the Universe
Thanks for the suggestions! We’re considering different ways of making apps more discoverable and highlighting our developers more prominently. I’m curious what kinds of information you’d like to see on a developer profile.
Agreed. Also, as a consumer, I’d MUCH prefer to have Airtable handle my billing than have to rely on the developer to set up things well.
This is roughly what we’re imagining so far as well!
Here are a few questions:
Has Airtable come out with best practices for storing and displaying sensitive data such as API keys in a custom app?
The Developer policy states that apps may not use unpublished APIs. What about an internal unpublished APIs that the developer has created specifically to interact with Airtable but does not want the public using?
The Developer policy states that apps must function on the desktop version and all supported browsers. It is not realistic for independent developers to actually test all of those scenarios. What do you consider to be a reasonable amount of testing for an independent developer?
The Developer policy states that apps may not “[d]isplay advertising or promotional content beyond your (or your organization’s) name and logo” Does this mean that we cannot include even a website in the app itself?
How can a Developer remove an app from the marketplace if the developer no longer wants the app to be available?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide customer assistance? Are we allowed to charge for customer support?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide bug fixes in a timely manner? What if the “bugs” are in a 3rd party library that the developer uses?
What are the consequences for failing to provide timely assistance/bug fixes? What notice will you give developers if they are not in compliance? Will you give developers any assistance?
How will Airtable determine if there are user issues, since developers must provide contact information? (Presumably users would be contacting the developer directly.)
Will there be an in-marketplace method for obtaining feedback from users? For example, will there be a rating/review system put in place?
Great idea—this is another area we’re interested in exploring further. In the meantime, I’d recommend including a feedback link somewhere in your app (e.g. a link to a feedback form or a mailto link to your support email).
(We’ll be replying to the questions here separately - here’s the answer for #2!)
Hi Kamille,
Great question - these things (management of your custom apps & making it easier to collaborate on custom apps with other users) are on our radar and we plan to start tackling this soon.
More broadly, this is related to the anticipated major changes around remotes mentioned in our announcement. We plan to improve several aspects of “how apps work” that are more related to the in-Airtable experience of managing and using your custom apps (rather than the developer tooling).
These details are subject to change as we work on it, but this is the current, high-level plan:
Add some form of “My Apps” like you mentioned, where you can see your apps and view details about each one.
This will replace the current “remotes” feature - instead of having to create a new custom block in each base you want to use it & keep each remote updated, you’ll be able to install that one app between multiple bases.
You will also be able to list your app on the marketplace from here & manage your listing.
Add some form of “app collaborators”, where you can add other users to your app. In the future, this could also include different permission levels (e.g. being able to develop the app, or just install it.).
Two caveats:
These features require major foundational improvements and redesigns, so this is a longer term project - we can’t share any sort of timeline at the moment.
Since this is a larger project, we don’t have specifics on what exact features will be included, etc at this point in time. However, feedback from the community on what they’d like to see here is useful and we’ll definitely keep it in mind. We’ll also explore ways to get early feedback from developers on this new experience when we’re later in development.
This is also on our radar. In the short term, we’ll send out regular reports with metrics to developers who have listed an app on the marketplace. In the longer term, we’re thinking about ways to give developers access to these metrics directly (likely via the a developer portal of sorts like you mentioned.)
As someone who has an app in the Marketplace, and two apps that there’s no way I’m open-sourcing, I just want to make the push for everything you’ve mentioned in this reply. It would be ultra useful, and I would love to beta test it if that’s possible as the idea develops!!!
You probably haven’t had time to create developer resources yet for all of the information you need from people submitting blocks/apps. However, that would be really useful. For example, if you could have examples of reviewer directions, short and long descriptions, etc. Do’s and don’ts for screen shots and other graphics would also be nice.
How can I tell if I’ve already filled out this form or not? Lol, I feel like I’ve filled out a zillion forms for Airtable signing up for different things.
If you can create custom apps in the base you have creator access to, you have developer access! I’m super confident that in your case, you already have access :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:
Here are a few questions:
Has Airtable come out with best practices for storing and displaying sensitive data such as API keys in a custom app?
The Developer policy states that apps may not use unpublished APIs. What about an internal unpublished APIs that the developer has created specifically to interact with Airtable but does not want the public using?
The Developer policy states that apps must function on the desktop version and all supported browsers. It is not realistic for independent developers to actually test all of those scenarios. What do you consider to be a reasonable amount of testing for an independent developer?
The Developer policy states that apps may not “[d]isplay advertising or promotional content beyond your (or your organization’s) name and logo” Does this mean that we cannot include even a website in the app itself?
How can a Developer remove an app from the marketplace if the developer no longer wants the app to be available?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide customer assistance? Are we allowed to charge for customer support?
Can you clarify on the requirements to provide bug fixes in a timely manner? What if the “bugs” are in a 3rd party library that the developer uses?
What are the consequences for failing to provide timely assistance/bug fixes? What notice will you give developers if they are not in compliance? Will you give developers any assistance?
How will Airtable determine if there are user issues, since developers must provide contact information? (Presumably users would be contacting the developer directly.)
Will there be an in-marketplace method for obtaining feedback from users? For example, will there be a rating/review system put in place?
The “unpublished APIs” bit of the developer policy is meant to refer to unpublished Airtable APIs. We don’t currently have any specific restrictions in the policy regarding external API usage. As part of our app review process, we will look at all requests to and responses from external services to ensure app security.
Regarding cross-browser compatibility, I think a “best effort” approach - my recommendation would be to use a tool like https://caniuse.com/ or MDN docs when evaluating whether to use a given DOM / JavaScript API. More broadly speaking, our interpretation is that if users are repeatedly encountering a specific browser-related issue while using a supported browser, we’ll forward that bug report along so we can resolve retroactively.
Regarding in-app branding: linking to your site within the app is OK, this policy is more geared towards blatant in-app ads.
You probably haven’t had time to create developer resources yet for all of the information you need from people submitting blocks/apps. However, that would be really useful. For example, if you could have examples of reviewer directions, short and long descriptions, etc. Do’s and don’ts for screen shots and other graphics would also be nice.
Thanks for the great feedback! We plan on continuing to improve/streamline the app submission process, and these definitely would be good resources to add for developers submitting apps.
Really important question, thanks for surfacing this.
One thing will always be true - we also want to continue to support the “Makers” and “DIYers” in a first-class way. Partially selfishly, since we’re “Makers” and “DIYers” ourselves on the team, and would never want to feel like the Airtable platform is only a place for enterprises and businesses to play. Along these lines, we’ll always be prioritizing being able to build apps just for yourself, having a quick getting-started process, a seamless developer experience, not having to wrangle a bunch of boilerplate and infrastructure, etc.
I take your question in sort of two ways - hopefully one of these catches it:
Would like a better way to monetize as an “indie” developer. Totally understand the effort & annoyance involved in having to roll your own payment system in order to see any monetary benefit from these apps. We’re very keen on supporting a much more seamless monetization system for app developers - would love to get everyone’s feedback here Register your interest for monetizing apps on the Airtable Marketplace
Would like a better way to distribute apps for free without the overhead of needing to provide support, bugfixes, etc. Totally understand this one as well. Right now, just since the app platform is so new, we’re being conservative when it comes to having apps thoroughly reviewed & supported before including them in the marketplace. Right now the best “ad hoc” way to distribute your app is to open-source it and have potential users follow these instructions to install it in their base, though we recognize this process isn’t very non-developer-friendly. We’re also intently exploring ways to make this process more seamless - perhaps something like an “unverified” app section in the Marketplace, or a faster way to install an open-source app. Our top priority here will always be to ensure that Airtable users’ data will be secure and nothing unexpected will happen, but we definitely want to trend towards making app distribution overall more open.
Thank you very much for this comment. This attitude is one of the things that I find very attractive about Airtable.
Submitting a block by running block submit without any other prior contact or registration feels emotionally odd to me.
While I understand that a block/app should be as polished as possible before submitting it, if Airtable finds issues, what is the review process for correcting those issues?
About how long can developers expect it to take from block submit to the block appearing in the marketplace?
block submit is very much just the entry-point to the process. Because this process is very new, I’m not sure how long it’ll typically take for apps to get listed in the marketplace, but we’ll get back to you with at least a status update within 2 weeks. In practice though (especially whilst this process is new) you’ll probably hear from one of us personally much sooner!
After an initial round of review, if we encounter any issues, we’ll give you details of those. We can work with you to get them resolved, and any code-changes can be sent to us by running block submit again.
block submit is very much just the entry-point to the process. Because this process is very new, I’m not sure how long it’ll typically take for apps to get listed in the marketplace, but we’ll get back to you with at least a status update within 2 weeks. In practice though (especially whilst this process is new) you’ll probably hear from one of us personally much sooner!
After an initial round of review, if we encounter any issues, we’ll give you details of those. We can work with you to get them resolved, and any code-changes can be sent to us by running block submit again.
After the custom blocks contest, I was told that Airtable was interested in two of my three blocks for the gallery, but to hold off on my winning block. However, I did not get clear instructions on the next steps for placing my block/apps in the gallery/marketplace, or what to do with the third block.
Should I just run block submit for those blocks to start the process?
The “unpublished APIs” bit of the developer policy is meant to refer to unpublished Airtable APIs. We don’t currently have any specific restrictions in the policy regarding external API usage. As part of our app review process, we will look at all requests to and responses from external services to ensure app security.
Regarding cross-browser compatibility, I think a “best effort” approach - my recommendation would be to use a tool like https://caniuse.com/ or MDN docs when evaluating whether to use a given DOM / JavaScript API. More broadly speaking, our interpretation is that if users are repeatedly encountering a specific browser-related issue while using a supported browser, we’ll forward that bug report along so we can resolve retroactively.
Regarding in-app branding: linking to your site within the app is OK, this policy is more geared towards blatant in-app ads.
Please, please, please, whatever you end up doing with the Marketplace, DO NOT ALLOW MONETIZED ADS OF ANY SORT IN MARKETPLACE APPS.
I realize it’s a personal opinion, more than anything, but I can’t stand monetized web and mobile app ads. I think they degrade the quality of the apps themselves, the products they appear in, and the marketplace overall.
I would fully support an across-the-board ban on in-app ads for Marketplace approval.
As someone who has an app in the Marketplace, and two apps that there’s no way I’m open-sourcing, I just want to make the push for everything you’ve mentioned in this reply. It would be ultra useful, and I would love to beta test it if that’s possible as the idea develops!!!
I agree with Kamille. I don’t have an app in the Marketplace, but one of the reasons why I haven’t pursued creating more blocks/apps or putting them in the gallery/marketplace is because I don’t want to open-source all of my code and I need to be careful in investing my time in activities that don’t have a financial return.
Thanks for all the great questions, folks! We’re going to answer all the questions that have already been asked, but questions asked after this point might not get answers.
Thanks again all :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:
After the custom blocks contest, I was told that Airtable was interested in two of my three blocks for the gallery, but to hold off on my winning block. However, I did not get clear instructions on the next steps for placing my block/apps in the gallery/marketplace, or what to do with the third block.
Should I just run block submit for those blocks to start the process?
Yes please! We’d love to get your apps listed
Thank you very much for hosting this AMA! Thanks for the great info. I think that many of us are pleased to hear that there are plans for monetizing apps, but are waiting on the details. I’ll be sure to fill out the form.
