At the beginning of this year, Glide faced a choice: We could continue to make our platform easier to use or focus on making your Glide apps more powerful. We chose the latter and declared 2023 to be Glide’s Year of Power.
To us, power meant giving the apps you build with Glide more capabilities. We worked to make your apps able to handle higher volumes of data, handle more complex logic, integrate with more of your other favorite tools, and adapt more smoothly across all your devices. We also introduced Glide AI so you could create powerful automated workflows within your apps.
Looking at everything we shipped this year, it’s safe to say we achieved those goals, making 2023 our most impactful year to date. Our team shipped a huge number of new features and initiatives, and our users took full advantage of their new capabilities. Gliders built over 1,000,000 apps, created business software for more than 100,000 companies, and performed more than 4.2 million in-app AI actions.
Before we dive into building new and exciting things for next year, let’s take a moment to look back and appreciate what we’ve created.
Adaptive Apps
We combined Glide Pages and Apps into one unified adaptive app platform, enabling you to build apps that work smoothly across all devices. Adaptive design helps you build apps that function like software, not static websites, and which take advantage of the natural functionality (such as swipe navigation) of the device they’re being accessed from.
Glide AI
We introduced native AI features with Glide AI. We had some fun creating an AI app generator, but the real revolution was the AI-powered workflows we added to the Data Editor.
With these AI workflows, you can build apps that instantly create content like customer emails, product descriptions, summaries, and more. You can convert unstructured data into structured data automatically. You can also extract text data from images like manuals or receipts or instantly transform audio recordings into text.
Action Editor & Integrations
We overhauled our Action Editor to make it easier to create and reuse workflows and connected Glide to popular business tools with 35+ new native integrations.
SSO + Branded Sign-in
We launched SSO to help our customers securely collaborate across their organization with one set of login credentials. Plus, we’ve added new custom branding options to give your sign-in screens a professional, branded look and feel.
More power = more data scale
Powerful business software needs to be able to manage, store, and effectively use large quantities of data. We've added more high-volume data sources to help scale your apps without compromising performance.
Big Tables
Big Tables is Glide's first native database-grade data source that supports up to 10 million rows of data. Unlock powerful database features like charts and rollups and scale your apps confidently.
SQL & BigQuery
With our first queryable data source, BigQuery, we natively added the ability to run analytics across a large quantity of data using SQL (Structured Query Language).
We’ve also added read-write support for SQL data sources, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Google Cloud SQL, to help businesses build custom apps on top of their databases and query millions of rows without worrying about limits.
These relational databases have read-write capabilities, more stability, and the ability to support businesses that need more from their data, whether they migrate to SQL or build new apps on top of it.
New Folders and an Improved Dashboard
We revamped the Glide dashboard by adding folders. With folders, teams can unlock a new level of organization and maintain a clutter-free dashboard. Now users can customize the arrangement of their apps based on projects, priority, team, or anything else.
Call API & JSON
With Call API you can now send data from Glide to external APIs and retrieve data right into Glide without the need for 3rd party tools like Make or Zapier.
We've also improved JSON construction and deconstruction with two new JSON columns, making working with JSON in Glide easier.
Users can now make secure, authenticated API calls directly in Glide.
Improved Billing
We made major improvements to our billing system, with invoices that are easier to understand and more control over your payment methods.
Highly requested features
Along with all of those large-scale improvements, we added a multitude of requested enhancements that combine to help you build more useful and more powerful apps with Glide.
We have new components and design elements, like Notes, Image Carousel, Comments, iOS Push Notifications, and a Barcode and QR Code Scanner. We’ve also made Data Editor improvements, such as Import, Export, Hidden Columns, and Keyboard Shortcuts.
For a more exhaustive list and to follow future updates, check the product updates feed.
Education
Education on how to build better, more sophisticated tools with Glide is where power translates to empowerment. With that in mind, we introduced or upgraded many of the support systems we offer to help you use Glide effectively and develop advanced skills in areas like software development, data management & workflows, and user interface design.
With our educational materials, we want to ensure our users are not just proficient in Glide but can excel with it.
Launched Glide University
Glide University is a robust Learning Management System (LMS)—built entirely in Glide—with step-by-step tutorials, video lessons, and a wealth of community-created content to help you build all sorts of apps and features.
Expanded Glide Docs
We expanded Glide Docs to provide you with comprehensive interactive documentation for all the technical aspects of the Glide platform. This included adding Arcades to add interaction and the ability to work together through even the most complex topics.
Introduced Glide Certification Levels 1 & 2
Glide Certification is an opportunity to push your learning forward and prove your skill with Glide. It consists of a series of lessons followed by a test evaluating your knowledge. When you pass a Certification level, you’ll be able to show off your skills with a LinkedIn badge and become eligible to join the Glide Certified Experts Program.
Earlier this year, we launched Certification Level 1, and just this week introduced the more advanced Level 2, which tests your ability to build more sophisticated apps and workflows. Since then, more than 500 have gotten certified!
Wondering who’s getting certified? Check out the winners of our Glide Certified community challenge.
Glide Experts
The Glide Experts program grew to over 2,000 members. We’ve created more resources for the experts who help build incredible Glide apps for clients, including the Experts Hub.
We’ve also introduced Certified Experts, a higher tier to the program that comes with even more benefits, such as two years of 20% revenue share for the new clients you bring on board. Join the Experts Program if that sounds appealing.
The Column, Glide’s new and improved blog
We introduced The Column, our redesigned blog with an updated look and content categories. Expect to see Glide news, educational tutorials, and in-depth explorations of technology, app-building, and business operations.
Grew the Glide Community
The Glide Community is a group of active, engaged, and helpful Glide users. We added more than 3,000 new members this year, and we’re grateful for all the insightful questions, important suggestions, and mutual support they bring to the community.
A special thanks to our most active contributors: Darren Murphy, Thinh Dinh, Bob Petitto, Erwin Blom, Gideon Lahav, Nathanael Boy, Lucas Pires, and Jeff Hager. The community wouldn’t be a bastion of helpful advice and guidance without you!
What’s up next for 2024
We aren’t planning a comprehensive roadmap for next year. We think now it’s more important than ever to be dynamic, to work with our customers, and to learn and prioritize their feedback as we grow. With new technology, like AI, developing rapidly, we also value the ability to jump on opportunities at the earliest moment.
What we will give you is a few exciting themes you can expect from us in the next year.
Security
In addition to the security features we added this year, we are in the process of a SOC2 audit, providing you with objective assurance that your apps and business data are safe.
App experience & speed
We will be focusing more on the app experience and speed.
Speed — Expect to see improved speed and optimized performance for your apps. We've already begun a series of optimizations to the player, which serves your app to users. With further optimizations, we expect to get close to an instant-launch experience.
Dark Mode — Your apps will have a dark mode available that will be automatically responsive based on your users' device settings.
Collection Views — Possibly our most requested feature. We will introduce a more powerful collection view with a variable number of columns. It will have different visualizations and data types per column and the ability to select multiple columns and do batch operations on those items.
AI-enabled data sources
There is a lot that our customers want to do with AI that requires some investment deeper down in the stack and data storage layer. We will consolidate our data platform on top of our Big Tables architecture. This will enable some of the exciting AI capabilities our customers are trying to build, including the ability to chat with your data — yes you read that correctly — and ask qualitative or quantitative questions about that data.
Advanced actions with scheduling
We plan to add capabilities that will let your apps run more advanced actions and automatic workflows instead of being limited to actions that are triggered by your app users.
Scheduled actions — Run actions automatically at predetermined times.
Webhooks — Automatically trigger actions from external sources.
Batch actions — Change many rows of data at once instead of being limited to changing one row of data at a time.
Keep building
Everything we do here at Glide is driven by our mission to put the power, beauty, and magic of software development into the hands of a billion new creators — into your hands.
What will you do with the additional power we’ve built for you?
Let us know on X or LinkedIn! We want to hear what you have planned for 2024.
See the power for yourself
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Glide is a platform for creating professional software that connects your data and tools, without coding.
