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.
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.
:thumbs_up: Agreed, this is the intention of the current developer policy:
Display advertising or promotional content beyond your (or your organization’s) name and logo, or use Data in any advertisements or for purposes of targeting advertisements or contacting Users
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The Developer policy states that apps may not use unpublished APIs. What about an internal unpublished APIs that the developer has created specifically to interact with Airtable but does not want the public using?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 the questions! I’ll be answering a few of these as well.
All developers with apps listed on the marketplace will have a direct line of contact with the Platform team, and we’d be able to work with the developer on removing their app on request.
At this point of time, these requirements are rougher guidelines to follow rather than a set of precise and specific rules and regulations. As the marketplace grows and we partner with more developers to list their blocks on the marketplace, we anticipate solidifying and modifying these based on our experiences and learnings.
That being said, here’s some more detail on the requirements you asked about:
Regarding charging for customer support - we understand that maintaining an app takes time and would ideally involve monetary incentives - this is something we’re thinking about tacking more broadly for Marketplace apps as Taylor mentioned.
Given that, we expect customer assistance to generally be best-effort. We’d consider general day-to-day usage and standard setup of your app as a normal support obligation, but we don’t want to discourage you from engaging users of your app in a consulting relationship if they reach out to you.
Again, we expect this to be best-effort. We understand that fixing bugs takes time and, as with all software, you can never truly say you have 0 bugs. We expect developers to maintain the app to the quality required to initially list on the Marketplace, and prioritise bugs based on user impact.
If users are encountering a significant bug that’s hampering the usefulness of the app, we would expect it to be fixed in a timely manner - in order to build user trust in the marketplace so that developers can eventually monetize, we need to be sure that the apps that are in it aren’t buggy.
For 3rd party library, again it depends on the severity of the bug and whether it’d impact the ability to use the app.
We view listing your app on the marketplace as a partnership - all developers who list their app on the Marketplace will have a direct line of contact with the Platform team.
These issues will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, so it’s hard to say exactly what notices/assistance we’ll give. However, we are committed to working with developers to ensure a good experience for both the developers of an app and their end users.
In terms of the consequences, if the app falls below the standards for the Marketplace (for example, severe bugs hampering usability) we may, if it’s not possible to resolve through working with the developer, remove it from the Marketplace.
We have monitoring on our end for metrics such as app crashes that we’ll be keeping a careful eye on, and notifying developers of when appropriate.
Additionally, we do anticipate some users contacting Airtable support rather than the developer directly, especially in the early days of the Marketplace - we’ll forward those enquiries to the developer.
