Jon Melo retweetledi
Everyone I work with that is thinking of leaving @bubble starts with ‘I love Bubble, but…’
Which is super interesting. Because how could a company with such positive user sentiment fumble their lead so catastrophically. What is Bubble doing that makes advocates consider leaving?
The answer is probably more in what is Bubble *not* doing.
If you look at the feature releases for the last 6-12 months, the biggest feature released by Bubble for existing serious users with real businesses on Bubble that don’t have native mobile apps, is button icons. Button icons! In 2026!
And the most important ‘feature’ released altogether for this user segment has been Buildprint, which isn’t even built by Bubble!
The property editor updates are fine but don’t move the needle for anyone because experienced users already knew the ins and outs of the old ones so updating it would never be a priority for them.
The biggest question we have as users is ‘who is Bubble for?’. If you’re non-technical, you can’t really build anything substantial on Bubble and claiming as such is just wishful thinking. If you’re technical enough to use Bubble, you’re also technical enough to use AI-assisted development with code.
Not even the Bubble TEAM knows who Bubble is for. @emmanuel_s has this even been agreed? How can a product roadmap exist if you don’t know who you’re building for? ‘Win first builds’ but win first builds from *who*? There’s no sense of direction or coherent vision that we can see externally based on Bubble’s releases and marketing.
The serious users of the platform have basically been given nothing over the last year, so why would they believe they should stick with Bubble and trust they’ll get the features they need, when Bubble’s offered no words or actions to that effect?
For many it will be too little too late and the decision has been made to move off of Bubble. But for most, who are still unsure, Bubble has the opportunity to extend an offer to them and commit to features that they need, like workflow branching, returning data from backend workflows etc.
But on the current course, it will keep being ‘next year we’ll work on power users’ but it’ll never be attended to because the new user experience will always take priority.
It’s all good prioritising new users, until the existing users spending thousands of dollars a month decide to leave and revenue starts leaking from the back door of the platform.
I’m not naive to the importance of continued growth and staying relevant in an AI world but the reality is that a significant number of apps are now considering migrating (many for the wrong reasons, and they don’t actually need to migrate - but that doesn’t change the maths for Bubble).
Bubble has an opportunity over the next few months to extend an olive branch to serious apps and give them things they’ve been waiting for years for. Waiting any longer will be too little too late for many.
I’m rooting for Bubble and invest in the platform because it can have a future if it moves in the right (or even just any) direction.
I’m not going to just stand by it if we get nothing back, though.
English
