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Sep 14, 2020 05:59 AM
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!
Sep 17, 2020 10:18 AM
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.
Sep 17, 2020 10:18 AM
(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:
Two caveats:
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.)
Sep 17, 2020 10:19 AM
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:
Sep 17, 2020 10:22 AM
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?
Sep 17, 2020 10:25 AM
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.
Sep 17, 2020 10:25 AM
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.
Sep 17, 2020 10:26 AM
This is roughly what we’re imagining so far as well!
Sep 17, 2020 10:26 AM
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).
Sep 17, 2020 10:29 AM
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!!!
Sep 17, 2020 10:31 AM
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.