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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.
Thank you very much for hosting this AMA! Thanks for the great info. I think that many of us are pleased to hear that there are plans for monetizing apps, but are waiting on the details. I’ll be sure to fill out the form.
: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
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.
