Feedback on sample apps

tony1
Participant V

Hi AppSheet community. What do you all think of the sample apps? How do you use them? If you don’t use them, why not?

https://www.appsheet.com/sampleapps

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19 REPLIES 19

I use them. I was just looking through the sample apps for one that uses LINKTOVIEW(). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one with that particular expression. Good indexing of expressions, action types, etc will make the sample apps even more valuable.

After I wrote this, @Suvrutt_Gurjar introduced a nice sample app that uses LINKTOVIEW:

https://www.appsheet.com/samples/Example-of-how-to-make-a-gallery-view-of-clickable-icons?appGuidStr...

It even has LINKTOVIEW in the text explanation:

2X_9_92bfb2bcea6f14c7ad0df05980b72fee8435a43c.png

Nonetheless, when I try to search for LINKTOVIEW here, I come up empty handed:

https://www.appsheet.com/SampleApps?q=LINKTOVIEW&hPP=100&idx=help&p=0&is_v=1

Strange, huh?

Hi @tony,

If I may add a few thoughts here.

I have personally immensly benefitted from sample apps from time to time. I believe these are very useful in understanding an undelaying AppSheet feature or concept.

May be once in a while, say monthly, there could be a post from AppSheet team on sample apps or as and when a sizeable chunk of new ones are added. The post can always mention that the sample apps are available under Support -> App option and under “Sample Apps”.

This post could be under Tips and Tricks category. I believe these steps will give more visibility to all the excellent repository of sample apps, especially to newer members joining the community. Once an app creator knows their usefulness and where to find them, I believe she/ he will always search there to get ideas.

Also I have found that searching sample apps under the option Support --> Apps to be more useful and perhaps extensive , especially for pure feature based apps as compared to repository under Sample apps option. For example OCR and Report based apps are at least not easily searchable under option “Sample Apps”. However I easily find them under Support --> Apps option. This of course could be just my own experience or lack of understanding of using "Sample Apps"option.

tony1
Participant V

Thanks for the feedback. There are roughly two different kinds of sample apps that we have:

It sounds like both of you use the “how to” apps more often than the “full” ones. Is that the case?

I wasn’t fully aware of the difference. The link to the “full” sample apps is shown prominently at the top of the page, so that’s where I went:

2X_e_e21888af1ea7c142e1d2be0856800358143de50a.png

I now see that the “how to” section has the kind of search function I was looking for. I searched for apps with the LINKTOVIEW() expression (which I wrote yesterday that I couldn’t find on the normal sample apps part of the site) and found many useful integrations.

So, it seems to me that both are useful but perhaps there are quite a few people like me who aren’t fully aware of the distinction. Perhaps the search function could be improved or modified so that people who start out looking at the “full” sample apps can also find the sample apps that are in the support section.

Hi @tony,

Thanks for your clarification.

Yes, majority of the times I use “How to” sample apps. I find that “how to” section has an added advantage of listing both articles and apps together on a search.

I am of course aware by the very nature of apps in "Sample Apps " section that these are ,are more industry oriented "full"apps. However I was unaware of intetnded split of apps in two paths based on category.

Also, as per my understanding, I have found that all “full” apps are also vailable at “how to” section but probably not vice versa. For example, I could not locate “Icon Main Menu” or “Reference Actions” “how to” apps in “Sample Apps” section.

As I mentioned, I request you to consider popularizing “how to” section path also. An app creator is more likely to browse “Sample App” section because it is prominently there. Once she finds that a “full” sample app matching her requirement is there, she will also often need "how to " section to build the app further.

Thank you.

Ron_Mansolo
Participant IV

I have used them to problem solve certain features I have previously had issues with. They are definitely a very useful part of Appsheet.

I sometimes browse around the sample apps to look at interesting apps.

Muito útil e sempre vejo varias vezes para descobrir novas funcionalidade em meus aplicativos.
Se for possivel acrescentar mais exemplo, será bem vindo.

Edvaldo Evangelista jr

Hi @Tony!

I am coming back to this thread after a long hiatus. One thought I have about sample apps is that I would like AppSheet to provide more support for those of us who publish apps as samples. Specifically, I wish that AppSheet would not cause logos that we have used in our sample apps to be randomly changed to meaningless default AppSheet logos when the apps are copied. In my case, I have a logo on the app you see on the following page:

https://www.appsheet.com/portfolio/230844

If you copy the app, however, the logo will be removed. I’m happy to have my app copied but why can’t I at least have the branding maintained through the copy process?

Also, if AppSheet wants to harness the power of AppSheet creators to come up with interesting sample apps that people can copy and use and/or learn from, why not follow Google’s YouTube format? By that, I mean why not put a counter on each sample app so that people can see which one’s have been viewed and/or copied a lot?

I like that idea… Give the samples ratings, comments, etc… Give us a reason to post awesome samples.

Yes, there seems to be a disconnect between the AppSheet-provided sample apps, and the ones created by users and submitted as public samples.

User-submitted samples are only available on their profile page, and you have to click into each user to view their samples. There’s no way to search all user-submitted samples like you can with AppSheet’s default samples.


Between the search issue, and lack of ranking/download count, there isn’t much incentive for users to submit their own sample apps.

Adding a search and ranking system would likely encourage more submissions from the creator community, and would give new users a better idea of the platform’s full potential (samples are fairly simple apps).

Thanks for chiming in, @GreenFlux! I’m glad to know that we see eye-to-eye on this. I have a special interest in this because my own project has a free sample app at its core. Still, I really think it would be in AppSheet’s best interest to do more to incentivize user created sample apps. After all, leading platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have become huge because of user-created content. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that AppSheet could possibly become as popular as any of those platforms, but I do think that incentivizing user-created sample apps could become a sort of engine that helps AppSheet to grow that much more quickly.

Speaking of incentives, I have a question about one incentive – copyright – that I haven’t had time to look into. I’m getting close to what I think will be a more-or-less final version of my app. Within a year or so after finalizing my app, I hope to promote it fairly aggressively through YouTube videos, etc. I will actively encourage people to copy the app and they will be free to tweak it if they like. I would, however, be disappointed if someone tried to promote a tweaked version of it as their own creation, without acknowledging my contribution. I think I’m taking about a creative-commons license but I’m not sure what, if anything, I need to do to claim such a license for something I have built on AppSheet. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears.

I understand wanting to protect your work but I’m not sure that we could copyright an AppSheet app if we wanted to.

Regardless of complexity or uniqueness, the app is nothing more than a set of configuration settings to be run in a platform not owned by the app creator. To me, that seems like trying to copyright an email filter in your Gmail account- just with more settings.


I don’t know much about copyright/licensing though. Maybe there is a certain type meant for content created in another platform, like for blogging.

Thanks for the feedback. I probably don’t need to worry much about this anyway.

If I find out anything more about this I’ll report back.

I’m no pro, but understand copyright / IP a bit… In general they stopped allowing patents for “ideas” such as processes, etc… Even if that process is housed within software… Generally you need to actually invent something that changes the underlying function of the software… Example anyone can make a ride sharing app… Anyone can make a self driving car… Etc… Copyright also gets difficult because it has to be exact… So, that’s pretty easy to get around… This is why most people copyright/ trademark their branding. Further, every country has a different process/laws which is why you see “copy cat” apps and products in other countries… Sometimes you can trademark crazy stuff… Like Cheerios attempting to trademark the color yellow regarding dry cereal… So you can’t trademark/patent/ your concept behind the product of Cheerios… But you can attempt to trademark all of the branding associated with it.

Thanks! Sounds like I’m probably better off not worrying about copyright. I’m not interesting in this as a money-making proposition anyway.

tony1
Participant V

@Kirk_Masden Thanks for the feedback. The logo issue seems like something we could address… Could you make a separate post in the feature requests section for this? Thank you.

Thanks Tony! Actually, I wrote a feature request quite some time ago:

Being able to maintain branding would be great for me personally and I hope it would be advantageous to AppSheet as well. If AppSheet can further encourage (by allowing branding, etc) the creation of free, sample apps and then help users find them more easily, I think it would enhance the attractiveness of the platform.

Thanks again!