Today, we’re excited to get HN’s thoughts on one of our new products: Retool Mobile. It lets you build and deploy mobile apps in minutes, not days. The idea is there is a large class of line-of-business mobile apps, and the process of getting a simple form + button on a mobile device, in a native app, to POST back to an API endpoint, is startlingly difficult. (As a web developer myself, it has for a while been shocking how hard it is to build and ship something useful onto the app store.)
For us, it was important that we build a native mobile app. That’s because although the web as a platform has come a long way, we think Apple / Google are — to some extent — anti-web, in the sense that they hamstring web developers in an attempt to get more apps on their app stores. With a native app, we were able to ship a brand new set of mobile-specific components, drive substantially more performance, and frankly — deliver much more delight.
The team is currently hard at work on white labeling, offline apps, and push notifications. We expect to ship all that in the next few months.
If you have any feedback on the product, please do comment in this thread! HN is a particularly valuable source of product feedback for us, and the team is very eager to please HN readers. (Since if we can do that, we can surely please any developer, hah!)
We focused a lot on development workflows like staging environments, versioning with Git, debug tools, monitoring with Datadog, etc. There are a few development workflows we can make even better because we own the run-time. For example with Mobile when you’re shipping a new update you can test on a staging environment, test the app directly on a device (vs emulators) and inspect issues with debug tools. Then when you’re ready you can push it live OTA so everyone is on the latest version.
Are there other development workflows that would be helpful for you? We’re investing a lot more here and would love any ideas
I couldn't agree more with this statement. The issue isn't that internal tool builders lack a feature to do it, I think the problem is deeper and comes from the way they are designed.
Most of them allow you to build the frontend (web or mobile here) without providing any backend code. They provide you with an integration library, whether it's connecting to a third-party SaaS or to your backend code. But that's where it ends.
With Forest Admin, we have a completely different architecture. All the backend code is automatically generated with the UI, allowing you to be up and running in a few minutes.
This has allowed us to provide a rich development workflow environment both on the backend (the code is yours and runs on your own machine, so you can use your Git without changing your habits) and on the frontend. This gives you the ability to fork a branch from your production environment to a dev environment, make your changes, merge them on a staging before pushing to prod, etc.
This command line is heavily inspired by Git, allowing you to have a development workflow that works in sync between backend code and frontend layout, enabling collaboration with large development teams on an admin panel (+100 devs for our largest customer!).
With this it looks like I could keep the same developer experience and build something quickly!
Thanks for guaranteeing me consulting work on rewriting those apps in the near future I guess ?
There are quite a few low/no code solutions now, but I can’t even recall using one of these, every serious company still seems to go native.
They are always missing features that most devs would refuse to live without...
Language features to support high reusability / modularity, robust dev tooling for navigating the software, support for proper a sdlc, etc...
Retool is still working out parts of the SDLC around modularity and the equivalent of a git flow for visual app development. Lots of energy going into this, would stay tuned for updates this year.
As you're grokking the mobile platform (or Retool generally) I think it's helpful to keep a couple things in mind.
- At least for now, Retool is designed and optimized for CRUD apps and operations software. On the mobile side, that will mean field workforce applications and mobile data entry stuff. If you need to provide a consumer-level user experience, building native (or React Native / Flutter at least) is probably your best bet.
- Consider solving problems with software on a spectrum from (approximately):
Spreadsheets > Airtable/Zapier > Retool > 100% custom UI (React & friends)
There is an appropriate time and place to deploy all these tactics. The sweet spot for Retool is for those use cases that can benefit from being codified in software (the flexibility of a more spreadsheet-y approach is detrimental/insufficient), but the business process is more important than granular control of the UI presentation. Instead of going full-on React, you can assemble a software-driven flow in Retool with about the effort it takes to assemble a non-trivial Keynote presentation (provided you know JavaScript - Retool is much harder if you are not a developer).
As always, there are trade-offs to consider when selecting the right tool for the job!
Is there much of a market left for non-compute intensive desktop apps? Or desktop apps that are a flagship product (slack client, zoom client, etc) but would you use a low code tool for that?
On-prem is a real pain in terms of delivery. For a lot of customers there’s long lead times and change management processes to navigate to upgrade to a new version. There’s a wide distribution of environments and network topologies that introduce often surprising edge cases. There’s a whole lot you don’t control or don’t have visibility into. Which is almost by design and perfectly fine - it’s why the customer chose on-prem!
But… the trade off is you really want high conviction your new feature is perfect before it goes on-prem. You can just flip a feature flag to temporarily roll back some capability if you uncover an issue. It might take your customer months to negotiate with their internal stakeholders a deployment window for an upgrade.
Now obviously that’s not true of all on-prem customers. But it was true for such a large percentage of them that it was more pragmatic to accept it as the general case rather than have a higher velocity flow for the handful that would adopt new capabilities at a pace closer to Cloud customers.
Is that the list going blank for a fraction of a second? If so, that is jarring - is this a limitation of React Native or what's going on there?
> Native mobile components include a barcode scanner, camera, NFC reader, geolocation tracker, signature pad, and Zebra integration to allow you to fully enable your field teams to operate efficiently.
The only mention of Zebra in the docs is for zebra striping table rows/lists.
Or does it mean Zebra printer for label printing via ZPL?
My wheelhouse is label printer integration, so I’m naturally drawn to printer vocabulary.
If anyone is in the market for a zebra label printer design app and API based rendering, check out my app at https://label.live/
I legit think with your new workflows you are gonna kill the non open-source competition (Airplane, Superblocks) and now the question remains if being an open-source alternative is strong enough of a differentiation for the rest of us. Our case is slightly different as we bet on our open runtime and advanced workflows to serve different enterprise needs but needless to say, I wish you guys were not so good.
Curious if Retool got explicit permission to do this.
[1] https://blog.expo.dev/upcoming-limitations-to-ios-expo-clien...
So it looks like this is mostly web-based and the app is just a wrapper. Then the app store ban isn't a big deal. They just use it through the Web (PWA).
Furthermore there are some apps that Apple can't do without to be able to sell their devices IMHO. Examples: Gmail, video streaming services, banking. If any of those apps from well entrenched incumbents won't like to play by the rules I think that Apple has to make a special deal with them or risk losing sales to Android competitors.
Smaller companies don't have any leverage.
As soon as I turn the phone, the video exits fullscreen mode and the part showing Ankur floats above the controls on the right side of the video player so I can't reenter fullscreen
Feel free to contact me at sean@retool.com if you have any questions.
