AMA: Apps + Marketplace Edition

[Taylor_Savage]

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.

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!

[somehats]

Andre_Zijlstra:

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.

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.

[Emma_Yeap]

Kamille_Parks:

2. 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.

(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.

Kamille_Parks:

Expanding on my desire for a developer portal where we can see all the apps we’ve built for Airtable in one spot:

Will developers who have had apps published to the Marketplace have access to any sort of metrics like number of installs?

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.)

[Taylor_Savage]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

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.

[Taylor_Savage]

kuovonne:

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.

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?

[somehats]

kuovonne:

Has Airtable come out with best practices for storing and displaying sensitive data such as API keys in a custom app?

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.

[Stephen_Suen]

Kamille_Parks:

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.

[Taylor_Savage]

Luke_McFadden:

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!

[Stephen_Suen]

kuovonne:

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).

[Kamille_Parks]

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!!!

[kuovonne]

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.