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Airtable Apps
- core-questions 6y agoMost of these apps are useless garbage nobody wants and few people are proud of working on. Even the biggest flagship apps are pretty thin - organized hitchhiking, a replacement for television, a new modern version of the Sears catalog. This "article" is just an ad for Airtable which looks like a reasonably competent low-code system. Commercial low-code systems (e.g. ServiceNow as a more entrenched established comparison) exist so as to lock you into a platform for which you'll pay exorbitant per-user pricing that really starts to hurt as you scale up. Maybe there's value to be realized by letting individual teams have influence over their business processes while still using a centrally organized system; but there are many significant costs to locking into something like this, and when you hit its limits you're still going to need coders and custom middleware, all of which will again be a sunk cost into a proprietary system you can never have real control over.
- reilly3000 6y agoHaving built a lot of glue apps with Airtable it’s definitely the case that coders and middleware get involved fairly quickly beyond spreadsheet use cases. I’m quite certain that Airtable > Spreadsheets, if for nothing else that field types, views, comments, and permissions are far more ergonomically implemented. The 50K row limit is quickly met for some use cases. Airtable proved out visual SQL and now is going full no-code with their Apps system. I think this makes for a big opportunity for a novel no-code OSS tool. Node-Red is fantastic, but having that central data layer at hand is a killer feature.
- haswell 6y ago> Maybe there's value to be realized by letting individual teams have influence over their business processes while still using a centrally organized system This is absolutely one of the core reasons cited by large orgs that purchase these solutions. And it's part of the sales motion from these vendors. When Bob in Finance needs to simplify one of his monthly close processes, he's not likely to get any traction asking for a new greenfield internal business app. But if his company has an investment in of of these platforms (like ServiceNow, SalesForce, Mendix, etc), it's possible that his team can take it upon themselves to solve their problem without having to get "real" dev teams involved. This brings issues along with it for sure: governance, quality, and as you mention: lock-in. But quite a few of these departmental apps become quite useful/popular, and enable teams to innovate on their own. I do worry about the future (~5-10 years down the road) when the proliferation of these apps becomes a problem of its own, at which point I fully expect to see a slew of new startups claiming to solve this problem. The better vendors in this space are already baking "governance, scalability, CICD..." into their products for this reason.
- VincentOrback 6y agoWe need less apps!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoBut more web-apps.
- fmakunbound 6y agoGoddamn it's hard to build stuff with Airtable. I tried building a spreadsheet like thing with a couple of other web services for things like images and locations along with user access controls and it was such a pain. Ended up push it out to a custom service in a Droplet which did most of the work.
- latchkey 6y agoTheir API is impossible for even a simple CRUD app, maybe this is their solution to that problem? It would be nice.
- ubermonkey 6y agoI had a thing that was outgrowing Excel, and a bunch of people said "Airtable! Airtable! Airtable!" and holy cow do I ever now downgrade any technical rec those people give me. Maybe I do not understand Airtable, but given its limitations I'm 100% not sure why it exists in a world that includes Google Sheets.
- KorfmannArno 6y agoIn contrast to Google Sheets, Airtable has an actual API. I'm not sayin Airtable is a silver bullet though.
- fmakunbound 6y ago
- bobbydreamer 6y agoPretty much fine with https://datatables.net/ https://datatables.net/
- hbcondo714 6y agoLooks like they just introduced a competitor to Airtable: https://cloudtables.com/ https://cloudtables.com/
- chenster 6y agoDoesn't seem do much other than a database with role permissions. Am I missing anything?
- throwaway123x2 6y agoWho is this "we" people keep referring to. I find the blanket "we's" so annoying.
- rglover 6y agoWell it's referring to "us," of course.
- neverartful 6y agoThat's what "they" say!
- vortico 6y agoWe need to stop using that terminology.
- tomdell 6y agoWho are these “people” who keep referring to “we”?
- choward 6y agoThe royal we.
- D2187645 6y agowe the people
- hombre_fatal 6y agoIt's French.
- SrslyJosh 6y agoIf your answer to a problem is "I'll just write the solution myself", this isn't for you. But if you don't have the time or programming skills to create something from scratch, Airtable is a very compelling alternative to "I'll just throw it in a spreadsheet."
- haswell 6y agoI could not agree more. I fit very much in the "I'll just write the solution myself" camp, but as a product manager at a company that sells enterprise low-code software, you've hit the nail on the head for why people buy these solutions. Orgs don't buy these solutions because they believe the end result is somehow better than a pro dev team and a proper software project. They buy these solutions because they can't afford to put their pro devs on some use cases, or just simply don't have that kind of staffing on hand. As an organization grows, the more "spreadsheet apps" there are, the messier things get. It's harder for teams to collaborate with each other. It's harder to replicate success across teams. Pretty soon, everything is SharePoint+Spreadsheet hell. Even if these low code platforms only provide one thing: a central data store - they've helped immensely. But interestingly (and again, I'm a bit biased due to my role/employer), people can actually make some pretty useful/functional apps. Often these are apps that would have never been turned into an app otherwise. But the underlying business process benefits greatly. I've also seen (a small percentage) of these simple apps become full-blown apps managed by dedicated dev teams over time. The problem was validated, and the value realized was so great, that the problem finally got the time of day and a "proper" solution was implemented. These things can't/won't replace "real" developers any time soon. But they do provide a path to a very under-served segment of knowledge workers. Personally, I think Microsoft could KILL if they made Excel more robust. I'm not talking MS Access here - I'm talking about a modern, cloud-native app dev platform that is centered on Excel. They already enjoy ubiquity, and they could change the game. There's a reason that the onboarding experience for most low-code platforms is "Choose a spreadsheet to get started".
- chenster 6y agoThe low code platforms give raise the so-called citizen developers for biz analies, PM alike. There are so much value because they don't need to squat additional IT resource for simple internal apps to boost dept productivities, when they grow beyond Excel.
- jrm4 6y agoWhy, yes, I too wish the world saw the value in modularity and that the Unixes and Hypercards took off in the way they were intended, but it's going to take a heck of a lot more than one company.
- chromedev 6y agoI can see in the future when hiring for a software developer position using an actual programming language, someone putting "Airtable" on their resume like it means something.
- puranjay 6y agoWell people already put Word and PowerPoint on their resumes like it means something.
- bleepblorp 6y agoGiven how many kids and youth are growing up with only cell phones and limited (or no) experience with real computers, these days Word and Powerpoint experience is a differentiating skill in certain circumstances. It's obviously not relevant for IT workers but it's absolutely something for employers to pay attention to if they're hiring young people for unskilled positions.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoOn the other hand, There are people at consulting companies that have almost their entire careers around building pitch decks
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- haswell 6y agoIt's hard to say if Airtable will rise to a level of adoption/prevalence to result in (or deserve) this kind of thing. But just to provide a counter-point (your comment is a bit catty): If it does, then people should put this on their resume, and that's perfectly legitimate. Large vendors like SalesForce, ServiceNow and even smaller players like Mendix, OutSystems, etc. do create new job markets. Go look up salaries for SalesForce Developer or ServiceNow Consultant. These are roles that one can learn without a full-stack background, but often command extremely high salaries because for better or worse, it's still a niche skillset, and someone has to manage those apps that someone built.
- 6y ago
- coldtea 6y ago>A half billion apps will be created. We need more software builders If "a half billion apps will be created", isn't the conclusion that we need fewer software builders? A half billion apps sound way more than needed....
- thorwasdfasdf 6y agoIndeed. I mean, just look at product hunt. Nearly every failure is due to lack of demand because there's already way too many competing products built. And there are a lot of failures. What is the percentage of apps that end up getting a sizeable userbase, less than 1%? There's already such a vast oversupply of software products out there without any additional platforms. It's far more accurate to say, we need fewer software builders.
- rileymat2 6y agoAn exceedingly high number of restaurants fail in the first year, an industry that has existed for centuries. And we are still opening new ones. This is normal, there will be more and new software products.
- vkou 6y agoSoftware, unlike restaurants, has trivial economies of scale, and colossal start-up costs. It's much cheaper to open a restaurant, then build a word processor that someone can get value out of. It's much harder to build your restaurant chain to serve 100,000 people, then it is to scale your word processor, that can serve 100 people, to serve 100,000 people.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thebean11 6y agoIt's pretty easy to build a tool or game that a few hundred people can get value out of though right?
- thysultan 6y agoI offer myself as tribute!
- d0gbread 6y agoThere's a lot of negativity on HN for tools like AirTable, but as someone that uses Coda regularly, I find it invaluable as a prototyping tool, if not a "production" internal app. There's nothing quite like having modeled and populated tables in such a flexible tool while everyone is trying to reach consensus.
- nullsense 6y agoYeah it's a fantastic prototyping tool. Or if all you need is a basic database a couple of people will use with quite light usage. I built a CMS for my wife's business and she's used it to manage all her clients accounts for the last 3 years. Took me all of an afternoon to figure out. It's been pretty solid, and incredibly low maintenance for me.
- tinus_hn 6y agoIt’s probably an enormous upgrade from the Excel ‘databases’ that plague enterprise.
- rilut 6y agoAre there any open source alternative for Airtable?