[HN Gopher] Show HN: Retool Mobile
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Show HN: Retool Mobile
Author : dvdhsu
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-01-19 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retool.com)
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| As the founder of one of the open-source alternative [1] to
| Retool, I thought of doing PWA for our apps to be fit for mobile
| but this is next level. Congrats to the whole retool team.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
| haolez wrote:
| Windmill looks pretty nice! Are there any ongoing
| internationalization efforts for Windmill? I live in Brazil and
| its pretty rare in my industry for internal (backoffice) teams
| to be fluent at English. I could contribute this, if I can get
| some directions :)
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We initially launched Retool on HN
| five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494.
| The feedback was extraordinarily helpful then (e.g. we launched
| source control, on-prem, etc. based on HN comments), and we're
| grateful for all of it.
|
| 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!)
| zbruhnke wrote:
| Hi! Retool on-prem user here ... is this going to be available
| for us too? Seems like we get everything fairly delayed which
| is a real bummer :/
| mikelikespie wrote:
| Mike, Mobile Eng Lead @ Retool, here. We support on-prem if
| you're on a version newer than 2.100 (which has been out for
| a few months). If you can reach out to your AE, tommy at
| retool dot com, we can get you set up with mobile in no time.
| zbruhnke wrote:
| sweet! reaching out now!
| what-no-tests wrote:
| What is an AE?
| oi_ocha_please wrote:
| account executive (sales rep)
| sirjaz wrote:
| When will retool be able to do this for native desktop apps?
| Especially for Windows. Otherwise, you are leaving 2+ billion
| active devices off the table
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| I've been playing around with SwiftUI recently and the developer
| experience and tooling make me miss my VSCode set up with copilot
|
| With this it looks like I could keep the same developer
| experience and build something quickly!
| shawiz wrote:
| Excited to have you try it out!
| stavros wrote:
| This feels like the wrong use for Show HN, no?
| dang wrote:
| I don't think so? it seems to be tryable-outable and they don't
| seem to have been overposting. What did you have in mind?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
| nightski wrote:
| It's a large boring company. Bring on the Salesforce Show
| HN's lol. The link you reference makes it sound like it
| should come from a single person who is hacking something
| together and wants to share it.
| croes wrote:
| OP seems to be the CEO of Retool.
|
| Edit: he is the CEO
| blitz_skull wrote:
| I'm trying to understand, and forgive me, maybe the core Retool
| product explains this better--how is this different from
| something like Capacitor/Ionic or React Native?
| shawiz wrote:
| Retool Mobile is built on top of React Native. We build a
| higher level of abstraction so you can build the UI / running
| queries much easier than building it from scratch, and still
| give you the option to write code and customize everything
| similar to building an app in React Native.
| paxys wrote:
| All of those are a lot lower level. Retool focuses on drag-and-
| drop UI and making connections to databases and external
| services.
| john2hughes wrote:
| I'm a prolific user of all things Retool. We are automating away
| our more mundane tasks with Workflows, but with Mobile we're
| redefining how our business is running. We have more visibility
| over our field sales, more control in our warehouses and
| ambitions to do more.
| smt88 wrote:
| This reads like it was written by Retool's marketing
| department, including the uppercased common nouns that refer to
| specific branding decisions.
|
| Considering the account was also created 1 hour before this
| post, I'm going to assume this is astroturfing.
|
| If it is: do better, Retool. Don't pollute communities you want
| to have a positive relationship with.
| pvg wrote:
| _Please don 't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look
| at the data._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| smt88 wrote:
| Go ahead and flag me, I guess.
| dvdhsu wrote:
| (Founder @ Retool here.)
|
| Haha, as an HN reader, agreed that it comes across that way.
| We haven't (and will not) astroturf. I'm guessing this
| particular user here is John Hughes
| (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-hughes-628713227), who
| works at a company called The Modern Milkman
| (https://www.modernmilkman.com/home/). Here's a recent video
| of him talking about how he uses another Retool product,
| Retool Workflows: https://youtu.be/a8lVEYiUJdc?t=2681.
|
| John has no financial interest in Retool. But I am glad that
| he likes the product!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Zababa wrote:
| > including the uppercased common nouns that refer to
| specific branding decisions.
|
| Some people have sometimes capitalization for common nouns
| that "seem important" or something like that (I don't know
| their actual reasoning). I've asked multiple times why but
| never got an answer.
| phphphphp wrote:
| I don't think so, Retool has a loyal fan base, I know
| multiple Retool customers who'd write a comment like that.
| Retool are popular enough that they don't need to astroturf
| to get comments like that.
| mikelikespie wrote:
| Mike here (Eng Lead on Retool Mobile). Thanks for the lovely
| note John! It's been great working with you throughout this
| process and we're really thrilled to hear how we're having an
| impact on your business.
| [deleted]
| madarco wrote:
| I really love the breadth of Internal Admin tools that are
| available today, however, I feel like none has an even minimal
| support to proper dev flows like dev/staging/production or a way
| to synchronize releases between our own Backend API and the admin
| pages.
| shawiz wrote:
| Totally agree that developing in many no-code tools is
| frustrating since you can't use the development workflows
| you're used to in your own IDE. Retool Mobile was built as an
| alternative to react native that makes it easy for developers
| that know some JS/SQL to build native apps.
|
| 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
| [deleted]
| matlin wrote:
| I wonder how long before Apple blocks this. They seem to be
| pretty hostile to these types of apps and even limited Expo's
| ability to load projects on iOS if you weren't the direct
| developer[1].
|
| Curious if Retool got explicit permission to do this.
|
| [1] https://blog.expo.dev/upcoming-limitations-to-ios-expo-
| clien...
| majikandy wrote:
| AppSheet do it too and they are owned by Google now, if Apple
| lets Google do it, I'd think Retool are fine?
| babyshake wrote:
| Presumably because this targets enterprise use cases it's not a
| threat to the App Store? Although I'm sure Apple could easily
| find some way to consider it to be a threat.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I guess even if they do, it's still available as a PWA, so
| there's that.
| k__ wrote:
| As far as I remember, you can onboard a bunch of internal
| users with TestFlight.
| [deleted]
| ushakov wrote:
| Is it me or does the person presenting look uncanny, almost like
| a 3D avatar?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Feels and sounds like it might be sped-up just a touch,
| therefore making it seem unnatural?
| naiveai wrote:
| My guess is the combination of sort of sped-up audio and video
| plus lighting that is too even and "perfect", and the random
| blinks that don't seem to correspond to a regular human's
| average intervals (seriously, go look at it consciously, it's
| very weird) combine to land it straight in the uncanny valley.
| splitrocket wrote:
| Well done team! Cant' wait for a map component!
| mikelikespie wrote:
| Thanks! We're working on the map component right now, so stay
| tuned.
| croes wrote:
| Anyone else has problems viewing the video in landscape mode on
| mobile?
|
| 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
| shawiz wrote:
| Hi there! I'm Sean the PM at Retool Mobile team and we are
| working on fixing this issue ASAP. In the meantime, please try
| this Youtube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTxGTioOIA
|
| Feel free to contact me at sean@retool.com if you have any
| questions.
| [deleted]
| foxbee wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=foxbee it looks like
| you've been using HN primarily for promotion. That's against
| the rules - please see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| When an account does that, we usually end up banning the
| account and/or putting what they're promoting into a spam
| filter. HN is supposed to be a community where people
| participate out of intellectual curiosity, not an advertising
| platform. The hallmark of intellectual interest is that it's
| unpredictable and _not_ specifically connected to other kinds
| of interest, such as commercial interest.
|
| It's also a little distasteful to intervene in someone else's
| launch thread to do this, although people do it all the time.
| madarco wrote:
| I'm evaluating Budibase for adoption at work, what is the main
| business model?
|
| We'll see more and more features behind a paywall?
| foxbee wrote:
| Hey. I'm happy to jump on a call to explain the model
| further:
|
| joe at budibase dot com is my email if you want to reach out.
|
| Other than that, our pricing is listed here:
| budibase.com/pricing/
|
| - We'll see more and more features behind a paywall?
|
| We'll continue to add features to the free/OSS tiers and the
| paid tiers. For example, we plan to release auditing in the
| next 2/3 months - that will be a paid feature. Our free/OSS
| tier is generous and provides a lot of value (SSO is in the
| free tier) - we plan to keep it this way.
| esprehn wrote:
| This seems to be a marketing page, are docs or tech details
| available anywhere? I couldn't find how it actually works without
| creating an account.
| shawiz wrote:
| Hi there, Sean from the Retool Mobile team. This is the link to
| the docs https://docs.retool.com/docs/retool-mobile
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-01-19 23:00 UTC)