My 2020 retrospective

Hi everyone, usually at this time of year, I write some kind of retrospective of our collective efforts over the last year as a larger AppSheet family. It is usually a long post, and thatโ€™s no different this time. This year however, I want to focus attention on what the product team has been doing (and not doing) and its effects on your use of AppSheet. One has to be honest โ€” we have had more things break than anyone would like, we have been less responsive than we should, we have been less engaged than usual in the community forum, and our support isnโ€™t as timely as it used to be. This post might provide some insight, as well as optimism for 2021.

In 2020, we have had to make a lot of investments that you do not directly see, but that prepare us to scale and grow rapidly. The best analogy I have is remodeling and expanding your house (something my family has done a couple of times). In our AppSheet version of this analogy, we are all living in the AppSheet house while we remodel it.

Why are we โ€œremodelingโ€ at all? The simple answer is because we were acquired by Google. We would have had to make many of these investments anyway, but not necessarily at the same accelerated pace. There are different aspects of these changes:

  1. We moved from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud. This not just a cosmetic change โ€” while both are rich and powerful cloud platforms, they have their differences. It is complex and difficult to do a live migration of a live service from one cloud to another. We pulled this off surprisingly well from my perspective (I expected trouble and was relieved). When we started AppSheet and began on Azure, we didnโ€™t necessarily set it up to be a large scale service โ€” we were tiny and started with the bare minimum. However, now when we are re-setting up on Google Cloud, we designed for the next N years (eg: we are now in more regions and can soon easily set up in many more around the world). So that requires more robust infrastructure โ€” where we store our code, how it is built, how tests are run, how things are deployed. As you know, we deploy everyday, and that entire mechanism has been moved over to a new approach.

  2. We made many changes (and continue to do so) to our code and to our processes to get more serious about security and privacy and compliance. Not that we didnโ€™t care about these before, but the standards at Google are extremely high and rightly so. Some of these code changes are things like securing endpoints in our service to prevent various esoteric attacks. Some of them require completely eliminating some third-party services and replacing them with internal services. Some of them require more elaborate logging. Google offers a โ€œbountyโ€ to researchers who find security bugs in any Google product. Some researchers did well for themselves this year with AppSheet. We get a limited time window to fix each such security bug and they take precedence over everything else. All of this is new code or code change, and with that comes instability. The code of AppSheet got built up gradually over 6 years. It had time to bake. Now there has been a lot of change in as short period of time.

  3. We added a number of new software engineers and product managers to the team. This fundamentally sets us up for strong investments in the future. However, to give you a sense of this, we used to add a new developer to our team once in approximately three months before joining Google. However, in 2020, the engineering team has tripled in size. And this happened in the midst of covid and lockdown and everyone working remotely. The broader new team has stellar people who have picked up ownership of many areas of the product. We are now a more balanced and capable team. However, it takes time for new teammates, however skilled, to learn the nuances of a large pre-existing system.

  4. We changed a number of internal processes, especially around support but also around sales. This is mainly an artifact of how a larger company works. Each individual product at Google doesnโ€™t have its own support ticket system and its own sales CRM system, etc. It makes sense to integrate with common systems so that there is more efficiency. There are common frontline support engineers who support a variety of products. They provide 24x7 support because they are distributed around the world (something we didnโ€™t have before). On the other hand, AppSheet is a complex system that they have to learn. Many of you know the product for years and know it better than they do. They are trained a certain way and that may not be the way we have handled support in the past at AppSheet.

  5. We are in a large company now. There is more overhead and process and decisions are more deliberate. There is more internal alignment effort needed (eg: AppSheet has started deeper integration with GSuite/Workspace but that takes discussion and education and meetings). It has taken a while for us to all know many new people at Google and learn how things work and who to talk to about what and what the processes are.

  6. We made conscious decisions to steer our product towards more modern standards. You see these changes in the UI, both in the editor as well as in the app UI. There are also a number of code-internal changes. For example, I personally am in the middle of completely refactoring the workflow code so that workflow actions can be used in new and interesting ways, especially in a new process automation capability we are launching next year. Any code change has ripple effects, some intended and some not.

Each of these investments take time and energy โ€“ and this is time and energy not spent with you in the community or on the product. Some of these investments are destabilizing in the short term but very valuable in the medium-term. And they are all coming on top of each other and involve the same set of people. This is why the first year after an acquisition is the โ€œintegrationโ€ year and it is known to be challenging. We have been fortunate to have excellent colleagues and supportive management at Google. They are bought into the vision of a no-code app platform and are excited by the potential to make this richer and more broadly accessible.

We have also been fortunate to have a loyal customer base, though we have sorely tested your patience this year. I have optimism for the future โ€“ internally, we feel we have turned the corner and now operating with greater cohesion and efficiency and focus every day. It may be still a few weeks or months before you observe that to be real in terms of outcomes but Iโ€™m cautiously confident on that front.
While we will still stumble occasionally, in 2021 we will try to reward your patience with a better product and better service. One of the things I have heard very clearly is also the need for greater transparency on our plans and roadmap, and also a changelog of the incremental changes we make every day and every week. That is something you will definitely see from us starting January. Also, we know we have seriously fallen behind on investing in our solution partners. On this front, while we do not have a plan to report, we will hold a partner session in January by which time we will have made some progress to share.

It continues to be a privilege to work with all of you. I have scheduled an open meeting from 8AM to 9AM PST on Wed Dec 23rd https://meet.google.com/ria-pxqt-yda. All of you are welcome. Some of my colleagues will also attend. I will walk through a few of the topics in this thread, but mainly it is an opportunity for all of us to listen and learn from you. I cannot promise it will be useful to you, but if you have any questions, I will answer them as transparently as I can.

So I might see you at this meeting, but if not, happy holidays and letโ€™s look forward to 2021 being much better than 2020 in every way.

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16 REPLIES 16

cmartinez
Participant II

Iโ€™m new to appsheet, but I think all of you are doing a great job. Thank you!. I hope it last forever and google doesnโ€™t close down the service as it often doesโ€ฆ

LeventK
Participant V

@praveen
Duely noted to my calendar

raketa
Participant V

Praveen, I want to express my gratitude to you for all that you have already achieved over the years.
Thanks to you, I changed my occupation and started doing IT. At first I used Appsheet for the purposes of my manufacturing business, but then I switched to the no-code developer side).
Now I am building processes and doing integrations for other companies.
I am not a native English speaker, but it was not a big problem for me to understand Appsheet.
You and the Appheet team helped pivot my professional career.
Thanks again for your work.

No wonder you would choose to build a mostly DIY platform.

We have thoroughly enjoyed GCP since making the switch this year. Weโ€™ve been on Oracle Cloud, Azure, AWS, and now GCPโ€ฆ

Do you think we still need to continue whitelisting so many IPs for AppSheet?

I forgot that Google does this, I can only imagine the improvements to the platform!

Thank you!

MultiTech
Participant V

Cheers to you and everyone at AppSheet for all your hard work this year

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Tiger1
Participant V

I am now over a year using Appsheets. I come from a background of truly IT networking. I was an IT Director in my past. Moving into app building was scary, but after demoing 12 other platforms - NO ONE compares to Appsheets. Truly I can say this without hesitation. Appsheets created another way for me to have a job I love and build apps that my company never knew they needed. Along with your platform is this forum. I cannot tell you how much I use it. Guys like Steve, LeventK, Grant_Stead and many moreโ€ฆ have helped me so much along the way (I could not have done this without them!) I have been able to build apps that function exactly how we need them too and brand them very well. For all you say you might have done wrong, you have done so much right. Thank you Appsheets and all developers, Appsheet team and fellow app builders. Your platform, service, help has allowed me to have a job a love 100%. Thank you and I hope all of you have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I wanted to add one more thing. Ginny was my initial Sales Rep. She needs a raise! Best Sales rep Iโ€™ve ever had. Good job Appsheets! You guys donโ€™t even realize how good you and your service is.

Bahbus
Participant V

To be 100% honest, for every other platform I tried to use that seemed technically more geared for what I wanted, they always failed in a bunch of other places that AppSheet already makes easy. HoneyCode, for example, has super cool custom UI editing capabilities - just drag n drop instead of hardcoded views. But, like, relational lists were impossible. Not difficult, just didnโ€™t exist (at the time, donโ€™t know currently). Dereferencing wasnโ€™t a thing either.

AppSheet is so good because its power lies in its Excel similarity. Everyone else just makes it weird and nuanced. AppSheet is the Tim the Toolman Taylor of the no-code world.

(Just give us even more FUNCTIONS )

Austin
Participant V

Understatement.

As a general sentiment the new UI is 10/10 only getting a -10 because it fundamentally doesnโ€™t transfer from the previous UI style to the new. Some apps look so much better while some just look and feel completely different and in a terrible way. The whole process of why apps are built to look the way they are is changed by the UI changes. Fonts, text sizes, colors, bolds, italics, icons, etc. just feel different and we have to go take control of these things immediately in some cases. The randomness and forcedness of this new UI is the hardest thing to bare. It might just be that no functionality changed so this style of change is seen as ok but even we just had until we released our next stable versions to make the corrections in private would go a long way.
Its on the level of shock if you were watching an animated show and it goes from 10 yr olds cartoons to 90โ€™s hand drawn anime.

This is one of the most anticipated features for me canโ€™t wait.

Canโ€™t wait and will hold you guys to it

Appsheet is that friend we can make fun of but anyone else that so much as look wrong at it will get a knife pulled on them. Makes my pull my hair out and makes me stay up late at night cause I just canโ€™t stop. Look forward to the new ways you can impress me and the new ways you will inevitably annoy me.

MultiTech
Participant V

In case you missed the meeting, there was some good feedback from members of the community - along with some nice windows into whatโ€™s upcoming for the platform.

โ€“| Table of contents |โ€”

Watching on YouTube might be easier

(If you view this on YouTube, the scroll bar will be split up into sections to make it easier, along with the timestamps in the description actually being links into the video - just FYI)

0:00 - Introductions
2:06 - Praveen Getting Started
3:15 - @Kambwili feedback
5:48 - @Lucinda_Mason feedback
10:00 - (Material Design UI Updates) Explanation from Praveen
15:25 - @CHRISTOPHE_CHANDELIE feedback
17:21 - Topic-based sub-groups (construction, healthcare, etc.)
20:39 - @JoeBirk feedback
23:35 - @MultiTech_Visions feedback (no audio SKIP OVER)
26:38 - (no video) โ€œLive savingโ€ in the Editor
29:43 - WhatsApp Integration
32:35 - Removing the AppSheet app icon (on a device)
39:01 - Feature release details: (Videos)
39:51 - Feature release details: (Custom Yes/No Labels)
42:04 - Feature release details: (Global Filters)
43:30 - Feature release details: (User Consent)
44:27 - Upcoming features in 2021: (G-drive as a data source)
45:28 - Upcoming features in 2021: (Automation Features)
45:49 - Upcoming features in 2021: (App-Script Integrations)
46:29 - Upcoming features in 2021: (Big Query)
46:56 - Upcoming features in 2021: (Advanced Data-Source Integrations)
49:06 - Praveen closing


There was more after Praveen was done sharing, but I didnโ€™t restart the recording (mia culpa); @LeventK showed up and had some good feedback about the need for better chart integrations

  • which sounds like they are in the works and coming.

(Sorry about some of the video black outs, along with some longer pauses in audio (that might have been when I was talking - OBS wouldnโ€™t record my audio and let other programs use the mic too).

My google calendar has failed me yet again thank you for the video

Thanks @MultiTech_Visions!
I was hoping someone would post a video. I wanted to attend but couldnโ€™t make it.

And thank you, @praveen for hosting the event!

Jonathan_S
Participant V

Man, I wish I was on this call :(, halfway through.

Praveen, thanks for the update, just received the email a few moments ago, would have liked to have joined the meeting on the 23rd. We now have a better understanding of the hurdles your jumping over. We look forward to the changelog addition. Keep up the great work!!!

Ethan_U
Participant V

Thank you so much for the update and for the openness and humility. I wish you and the team the best of luck evolving the product and given the fact that itโ€™s already amazing I certainly look forward to the changes to come.

Francios
Participant III

@praveen looking forward to the January partner session. Happy holidays to you and your team and all the best for 2021

Just created an account to say Iโ€™m super excited to see AppScript and BigQuery on the road map Thank you very much for looking into those essential features!