Re: Custom Blocks update: Apps, SDK v1.0.0, and more
Hi,
Thank you for your participation in the Custom Blocks Beta! We have some big updates about Custom Blocks that we’re excited to share with you today. (Airtable has also launched several other new features today—you can check them out in our community announcement and in this blog post.
Blocks are now Apps
Firstly—Blocks are now called Apps! You can read our announcement here to find out more.
This rename doesn’t change anything about how you manage your custom apps - no action is required on your end. The Blocks SDK and CLI are not being renamed and will continue to be published as @airtable/blocks and @airtable/blocks-cli.
Publish your apps for anyone to install
Secondly—we’ve heard many questions about if it’ll be possible to publish your custom app to the Airtable Marketplace (formerly known as the Blocks Gallery). Today, we’re excited to announce an official pathway for any developer to submit their custom app to the marketplace!
With the new block submit command, you can submit your custom app to be reviewed for addition to the Airtable Marketplace. If accepted, every Airtable user will be able to see and install your app from the marketplace. Several of the winners from the Airtable Blocks Contest have already been published to the marketplace, including the Image Markup, Scheduler, and Eazyfields apps.
You can find out more about submitting your app to the marketplace here.
General availability of the Blocks SDK & v1.0.0
Thirdly—the Blocks SDK has graduated from beta and is now generally available. Thank you all for your feedback during the beta—seeing your blocks and hearing your opinions has been instrumental to us as we worked on improving the developer experience.
We’ve also published v1.0.0 of the Blocks SDK. It includes some breaking changes, but as of this release, all existing public APIs in the SDK are stable. We’ll be following semantic versioning for new versions of the SDK going forwards: from now on, breaking changes will always involve a major version increment.
Remotes and future improvements
Lastly—we’ve been listening to your feedback during the beta and hear the community’s concerns about the difficulties with distributing a custom app between multiple bases and keeping it updated. This is something we’re actively working on. Currently, the recommended workaround is to use the remotes feature. Remotes are still in beta—we anticipate major changes and improvements here in the future.
Thank you once more for your participation in the Custom Blocks Beta. We’re excited to be moving to a new phase with Custom Apps, and we can’t wait to see what you build next. As always, we’d love to hear from you—let us know your thoughts at the community forum. We’ll also be hosting an AMA in the Custom Apps community forum at 10:00am PST, Thursday 9/17, where you can ask us any questions you have about this launch. You can find the thread here—feel free to post your questions ahead of time.
The Platform team at Airtable
