Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets

167 points

7 years ago

Hello, HN!

We're Antonio, David, Jason, and Mark. We’re building Glide (https://glideapps.com). Before this we worked on Xamarin, quicktype, Ubuntu, Mono, and GNOME Do :D

Glide makes it easy & fun for anyone to create apps without code. Pick a Google Sheet and Glide assembles a polished, data-driven app that you can customize, share as a PWA, and publish to the App Store and Google Play if you desire.

We've spent the last decade building developer tools. In that time we've watched thousands of developers struggle to design, implement, and maintain apps, and most developers we know avoid mobile development altogether.

Apart from developers, we hear worthy app ideas from non-technical colleagues, friends, and family every day: apps for work, new business ideas, and silly apps just for fun. All of these people can make websites, so why can't they make apps?

We were dismayed to find that there are hundreds of 'low-code app builders', but none that excited us. They're enterprisey, they output kludgy apps, and their low-code contrivances often felt more complicated than the code they replaced. Why hasn't anyone made the Google Docs or Figma of apps yet, we wondered.

That's our ambition. Glide makes app development web-based, collaborative (coming), and fun by combining data-bound components with a familiar spreadsheet model. Spreadsheets are the most successful programming model of all time, and smartphones are the most successful computer, so we're bringing them together to enable anyone to create apps without code.

We've implemented a component model based on self-adjusting computation (http://www.umut-acar.org/self-adjusting-computation), which allows Glide apps to update efficiently and continuously just like spreadsheets. You can see the benefit of this in our Comments component, which syncs comments in real-time to instances of the same app. In other words, Glide apps are multiplayer by default.

We're just getting started and would love feedback on the approach. There are many technical/design challenges ahead of us but we are encouraged by the useful apps our users have created with this early version. We even use Glide to build Glide–internally we've created dashboard apps, an app to share updates with our advisors, a directory that shows us which Glide apps are trending, and an app for our YC group.

Next on our roadmap: forms, improved image handling, notifications, and offline.