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Re: AMA: Apps + Marketplace Edition

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Taylor_Savage
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Hi everyone!

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.

Airtable Marketplace

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!

52 Replies 52
Taylor_Savage
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Hey everyone, and welcome! We’re getting started with the AMA - we’ll answer any question posted here before 10:30 - so keep it coming!

Thank you very much for having this AMA!

Hey Martin, welcome! We’re holding the AMA right here in this thread - so you’re in it!

Hi @LukaszWiktor,

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.

Lots of question on the marketplace - we’ll try to answer most marketplace-related questions here

We absolutely want to make it possible and straightforward to monetize apps in the Marketplace.

In general, we get super excited by the idea of helping foster the kind of ecosystem on Airtable that “creates more value for its participants than for Airtable.” Monetization directly within the marketplace would be a huge part of this.

That said, supporting monetization will be tricky for a variety of reasons.

  • Building a payments and distributions product, with all the nuances that come with that, is just fundamentally a big hard project.
  • We need to - as a community, not just as Airtable - tease out what the right model for charging would be for different kinds of apps, and build the trust of Airtable users that apps in the Marketplace are actually good, so that customers are actually interested in paying. “If an app costs money in the middle of a forest, but no customers are willing to actually pay for it, is it actually monetized?” … and such …
  • There are lots of different monetization models we could support - pay-once, pay-per-base, pay-per-user, freemium, pay-for-support, paid bundles, etc. We need to learn a lot more about which of these would be most appealing - both to developers and to potential customers - to help prioritize.

In the spirit of all of this, we’d love to get your thoughts on how you’d like to see app monetization work - we put together a quick initial form here to get your early feedback: https://airtable.com/shrFQkYXTVzLkwgEY

We’d love to talk to you directly too - so if you’re open to it, make sure to check the box in that form that you might be open to a direct conversation with our team!

We are considering open sourcing more of our apps and creating new open source examples in the future to help developers get started more quickly. Some of our apps (like Gantt) can’t be open sourced yet because they use legacy or internal APIs.

The flowchart app has already been open sourced, you can view the code (and remix the example) on GitHub: https://github.com/Airtable/blocks-flowchart

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.

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?

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

We don’t yet have a formalized developer partner program, though this is something we’re also exploring.

Right now, the best way to learn about new features in the platform is to sign up for the developer newsletter.

Would love to learn a little more about what you’d like to see as part of a developer partner program?

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.

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.

This is roughly what we’re imagining so far as well!

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).

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.