I have sent this as feedback to airtable, though I don’t expect a useful response. Partially I’m venting here, but I’m also curious about where the rest of the community sits on this (and if anyone “closer” to airtable has meaningful insight).
For several years, the airtable user community has complained about the dysfunctionality of the mobile apps. A large reason we invested in building systems with airtable was the mobile apps. For 3 years, we've accepted that it has "quirks," but that Airtable was working on it.
However, we've seen very little progress in this space. The apps are barely functional, which has complicated our workflow. We use airtable "in the field." However, it frequently fails to update records (i.e. you create a record, or add text/numbers to a field in the airtable app, only to find out several hours later those changes weren't saved). We constantly have to close and re-open the app to create/edit records that will give us "server errors," now allowing the record to be edited, until the app has been relaunched. This morning I had to do it 4 times within a few minutes.
The issue is worse while working on mobile data, but most of our work is on wifi.
We this issue on android and iPhones, including phones that were released in the last year (one staff member has the newest iPhone release).
We're losing faith in airtables development. We've seen lots of interesting development, particularly in the AI and portals space. Unfortunately these aren't tools that are overly important to us. Basic functionality is.
I understand that AI is seen by tech companies as something you must "keep up with", and is quite likely a business decision to drive new subscriptions. I'm sure it sells better than "our mobile app actually works!"
But this issue in particular, along with other frustrations (and generally poor support), mean we are beginning to explore alternative solutions.
There are other basic functionalities that have been requested from this community ad infitum (e.g. better colour coding options). I guess this is part of software dev now, where the focus is on features that drive subscriptions, rather than the nitty gritty. But for our whole time working with airtable, it’s felt like a product in beta and I’m losing faith it will improve meaningfully.
