More drama is about to explode on Bubble forums. They just unveiled the “Pioneers Program”.
Or maybe no drama…but come on! I prefer those beers in the Netherlands that I read about.
Perhaps I’m jaded, but I see this as Bubble getting free labor for their biz dev department, just like they use the forum as free customer support.
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My thoughts precisely. I mean the program is nice and I don’t see why they wouldn’t do it. The problem are those expectations. WOW…I wonder what they expect from their actual paid employees 
I think they are asking a lot from folks but I think Bubble is assuming these “pioneers” can just increase their market share and build a business of their own while they are at it. Kind of like Amazon is doing with local deliveries but at Amazon is willing to pay.
I do wish the wappler community was larger but it will get there.
Since taking on investment several weeks ago the DNA of Bubble feels like it has changed. What was once a platform that championed builders, listened to their community, and put their customers first feels like it has been replaced with a self serving strategy/philosophy.
Are they just trying to get free work from the community? Maybe. Before the pricing fiasco I would have considered applying to their new Pioneer Program but now I just don’t trust them anymore and I’m no longer willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ve gone from being a Bubble promoter, which I happily did for free without any desire to be rewarded, to a Bubble cynic.
Maybe I’m just still reeling from the sudden and drastic price adjustment but it actually seems tone deaf and not self aware for them to be asking for things from the community.
I’m really liking what I see with Wappler. The founder is engaged with the community, there are substantial updates released regularly, the community is helpful and knowledgeable, the technology is powerful, and the business model is more to my liking. Here’s to hoping Wappler will stay more true to it’s founding roots than Bubble. Please don’t break our hearts @George 
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I couldn’t have written it better.
Worst case scenario/end of world you take your code with you.
Nice to see you around David. You are a also long time bubbler. 2016 promotion if I am not wrong.
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I would not condemn this out of hand.
Firstly may I categorically state that I think the Wappler Ambassador idea is great, allowing the best and most committed to agree to give their time in support of the community and by inference the product.
However the Wappler team does not seek to use Ambassadors as a replacement for tech support, just an enhancement and that is why it works so well
Perhaps the people at Bubble have seen how the Wappler community works and seek to mimic it.
Only time will tell as to how this pans out at Bubble, with the correct support I think this could be a good thing for Bubble users but without team support I suspect it will whither and die
The idea of taking support into a community level is something I had thought of myself. The numbers probably don’t stack up yet (certainly where I live) but as the community grows I think an occasional Wappler users meetup with perhaps a few doing seminars would be a great resource, a small payment to cover costs but that would not need to me much
I don’t know about others but I have noted how people near to me tend to reach out and say hello, when numbers justify a a face to face, a “Wappler” meetup could be useful.
Bringing Wappler into business and schools is a much bigger step, getting them on board and managing any associated costs would be a big job but I guess possible with perhaps a special “Product Training and Demonstration” licence from Wappler to allow those doing this to equip a room with multiple machines for one off demo sessions rather than full site development.
I guess that is, to some degree, where I would like to take the Wappler Virtual Academy a training resource but with materials which could be used for product demonstration and as a series of training course references for use in “Code Club” type sessions within schools and communities.
Only time will tell with Bubble but done correctly this may actually become almost as good as the Wappler forum, but probably not!
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I think that nobody is actually against the idea behind ambassadors/pioneers. Wappler approaches the program with respect for people’s time and commitment.
Bubble expects the community to perform a business development role. I mean they actually posted the info as in any career portal.
Who would be great Bubble pioneers? -> Candidate description
What do we expect from Bubble pioneers? -> Job requirements
Benefits of being a Bubble pioneer? -> Job compensation
The problem is that the compensation is just a Discourse forum badge, a sub-forum to speak with the team and some swag. It’s an insult to the community and those heavily involved.
And remember that these are the guys that just recently raised $6 mill. I am not saying that they have to spend that money on pioneers of course. But they should offer quite more than swag and access to the team.
All in all, Wappler’s approach is much more respectful.
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Be careful with what you wish.
It’s better to have a smaller engaged community than what they have over at Bubble.
Do you remember guys when gaming people started showing up? Some guy created an app for some gamers for a specific game. (I don’t want to mention the name of anything so it doesn’t get indexed by google )
It attracted hundreds of people from that game to the forum and they started flooding the forum with “I need this done for me for free”.
Bubble moderators had to create a specific category in their forum for all posts related to that topic and they made it so that category didn’t show up in the main feed.
If you go into that specific category it’s a true reflection of the toxicity that surrounds gaming communities.
Growth is critical for any business but it’s a double-edged sword.
Disclaimer: Not all the gamers that arrived at the forum were toxic, but 90% of them were. I am also a gamer 
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Haha yes I remember the flood of that it was a swarm… just goes to show it only takes one thing to really bring the swarm in 
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The other thing I have noticed that has quietly disappeared (unless it’s been moved to another location) is their Roadmap. It used to be here - https://bubble.io/releases but now it only shows a log of what has been fixed and which features have been added (only 1 major in the last month!)
Thanks Jon! Yes, I started using Bubble in late 2015 and probably started using the Bubble forum in 2016.
I’m really excited to see more and more Bubblers posting on this forum. Hopefully we won’t annoy everyone else but using Bubble does create a certain mindset of how things are done and it’s difficult to change that.
I must admit that I don’t know much about professional programming, but I’m eager to learn and I think that Wappler can be a great bridge to bring me over to the more technical side of web development.
I really appreciate the knowledge that the community shares even though a lot of it is over my head.
It does seem like Wappler is a tool more for technical people to increase the speed at which they program rather than a no-code/low-code product. However, the more I go deeper with Wappler the more I’m realizing that learning it is doable. And as many have mentioned here, it’s time well invested since the knowledge is based on industry standards.
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One thing that I have noticed with Bubble radical supporters is that they all have a business around Bubble. They are completely biased.
Either because they provide templates, plugins, courses or mobile wrappers for it.
Absolutely none of them will add a specific disclaimer to their bubble recommendations. I feel that is very dishonest towards future users of the platform.
A few of them do add links to their products/services so the disclaimer is kind of implicit.
Anyway, that is something I have noticed to be different between the two communities.
There are a lot of people trying to milk Bubble’s popularity and will not hesitate in pushing the product in a biased way. Where as here the only users that have a service/around Wappler are users that have supported so much this community and nearly have been forced by users to create these services.
I just witnessed a Bubbler write in the forum that the ONLY shortcoming of Bubble is the lack of native features. Ironically he has a paid product that offers native functions 
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One thing I’m still confused on is if there is some sort of vendor lock-in with Wappler. It appears that we get access to the clean code that Wappler produces unlike Bubble. Is that just the code the front-end framework (App Connect) creates? I see that there is a backend component too (Server Connect) to Wappler. If we were to stop using Wappler at some point and export our code, what happens with Server Connect? Does it still work? Would we have to replace it with something else? What would be a replacement?
If you stopped using Wappler, everything would still work as before. And since it is just HTML, JS and CSS you can use any code editor or text editor to manually edit the code.
You are not locked into anything.
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Based on what I have seen, the codes produced is a collection of javascript and json files along with the aspx and php files depending on your server model. All of the logic is in the javascript files, though there are dll files specifically when your server model is .NET. Wappler (the software) is the editor with plugins that produces/gives you the html/php/aspx/asp/dll/js/css files your web server use.
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Yes, like most frameworks it is a collection of javascript libraries called from the front end.
The big difference with Wappler is that is contains a graphical front (app connect) and back end (server Connect) which allows the connections/ interactions easy to set up.
At it’s core I suppose it is not that different in principal to Angular/ React/ Vue etc however they need to be coded manually, Wappler can be coded visually
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A new place for all the ex-Bubblers to share their knowledge, tips & tricks: