Show HN: Retool Mobile

226 points by dvdhsu 2 years ago | 78 comments
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!)

  • madarco 2 years ago
    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 2 years ago
      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

      • raviparikh 2 years ago
        I cofounded Airplane.dev which you may want to look at. Everything you build in Airplane is normal JS/Python/React etc code that you can store in your codebase, version control, setup environments against, etc.
        • asadlionpk 2 years ago
          How's airplane doing in this somewhat saturated market? Compared to heap, which did alright I guess (I used it for my prev gig, loved it).
          • raviparikh 2 years ago
            We’re doing pretty well! The majority of people using Airplane aren’t comparing it to Retool or any other products, but rather to building internal tools in-house. Since Airplane takes a code-based approach there are lots of eng teams that try it out who would never otherwise consider the low-code/no-code platforms. So there’s a lot of addressable market.

            Glad you liked Heap :) That was a much more crowded market!

        • seyz 2 years ago
          Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://www.forestadmin.com.

          I couldn't agree more with this statement. The issue isn't that internal tool builders lack a feature to do it, I think the problem is deeper and comes from the way they are designed.

          Most of them allow you to build the frontend (web or mobile here) without providing any backend code. They provide you with an integration library, whether it's connecting to a third-party SaaS or to your backend code. But that's where it ends.

          With Forest Admin, we have a completely different architecture. All the backend code is automatically generated with the UI, allowing you to be up and running in a few minutes.

          This has allowed us to provide a rich development workflow environment both on the backend (the code is yours and runs on your own machine, so you can use your Git without changing your habits) and on the frontend. This gives you the ability to fork a branch from your production environment to a dev environment, make your changes, merge them on a staging before pushing to prod, etc.

          This command line is heavily inspired by Git, allowing you to have a development workflow that works in sync between backend code and frontend layout, enabling collaboration with large development teams on an admin panel (+100 devs for our largest customer!).

          • 2 years ago
          • 8n4vidtmkvmk 2 years ago
            you emailed me yesterday about a full-time frontend position, but made no mention of salary ranges. I'm not looking for a job right now, but if i were I'd want to know that up front so i could decide if it was worth my time. just a tip if you're trying to poach folks.
            • raviparikh 2 years ago
              California and New York law states that you have to include salary ranges in job posts, from my understanding, so it might be worth checking their job board to see if they list them there.
              • aabhay 2 years ago
                [flagged]
                • dcre 2 years ago
                  The mission? Give me a break. It’s a tool for making mobile apps. Clarity about pay is an unalloyed good for workers, and being sneaky about it is only good for bosses.
                  • jitix 2 years ago
                    Considering the massive shareholder value creation post covid, if everybody’s salary doubled tomorrow across the board the shareholders will hardly notice anything. Stop being brainwashed.

                    As of 2023 if you’re experienced you shouldn’t even entertain an interview call without salary range upfront. Luckily as per my last 2 months experience (in Canada) companies are very upfront these days compared to 3-4 years back.

                    • zackify 2 years ago
                      Why waste the time meeting if the range is 50% of what they are currently making? Post the range. Problem solved.
                      • 2 years ago
                    • 0xferruccio 2 years ago
                      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 2 years ago
                        Excited to have you try it out!
                      • blitz_skull 2 years ago
                        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 2 years ago
                          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.
                          • ohgodplsno 2 years ago
                            So what you're saying is that despite saying in your ad copy that you ship "native" apps, you ship the utter piece of crap that is React Native, and users will be faced with lists that stutter the moment there's more than twenty items in it because RecyclerViews are too complicated of a concept for RN.

                            Thanks for guaranteeing me consulting work on rewriting those apps in the near future I guess ?

                          • paxys 2 years ago
                            All of those are a lot lower level. Retool focuses on drag-and-drop UI and making connections to databases and external services.
                          • AJRF 2 years ago
                            Why do these things always fail? Is it because exec suite isn’t aware they exist?

                            There are quite a few low/no code solutions now, but I can’t even recall using one of these, every serious company still seems to go native.

                            • cjonas 2 years ago
                              Because they are built and marketed to "non-developers", instead of for developers who just want to be more productive.

                              They are always missing features that most devs would refuse to live without...

                              Language features to support high reusability / modularity, robust dev tooling for navigating the software, support for proper a sdlc, etc...

                              • kwhinnery 2 years ago
                                It's true that a lot of adjacent tools in this space are built for non-developers. But if you try Retool, I think you'll notice that it's definitely not "no code" - any interesting application will require a significant amount of JavaScript to handle key interaction events and API/database integrations. The experience is closer to iterations of the Xcode Interface Builder where you'd visually design the UI/layout, then specify event handlers in Objective-C/Swift. It's much less code overall because you aren't doing boilerplate UI structure, styling, and low-level interaction event handling (focus and keyboard events, e.g.), but all the interesting stuff about your app still needs to happen in JavaScript.

                                Retool is still working out parts of the SDLC around modularity and the equivalent of a git flow for visual app development. Lots of energy going into this, would stay tuned for updates this year.

                                As you're grokking the mobile platform (or Retool generally) I think it's helpful to keep a couple things in mind.

                                - At least for now, Retool is designed and optimized for CRUD apps and operations software. On the mobile side, that will mean field workforce applications and mobile data entry stuff. If you need to provide a consumer-level user experience, building native (or React Native / Flutter at least) is probably your best bet.

                                - Consider solving problems with software on a spectrum from (approximately):

                                Spreadsheets > Airtable/Zapier > Retool > 100% custom UI (React & friends)

                                There is an appropriate time and place to deploy all these tactics. The sweet spot for Retool is for those use cases that can benefit from being codified in software (the flexibility of a more spreadsheet-y approach is detrimental/insufficient), but the business process is more important than granular control of the UI presentation. Instead of going full-on React, you can assemble a software-driven flow in Retool with about the effort it takes to assemble a non-trivial Keynote presentation (provided you know JavaScript - Retool is much harder if you are not a developer).

                                As always, there are trade-offs to consider when selecting the right tool for the job!

                              • manmal 2 years ago
                                Look at the sparse amount of native components that comes with them. Need a native map view, or maybe AR? Overlay them with your own custom markers? Go native or at least React Native. One single tiny component that‘s missing will force you back to native code. And do you really want to invest months of work before realizing that you need to reimplement everything?
                                • shawiz 2 years ago
                                  We are working on custom components for Retool Mobile. With custom components, we hope to give folks the ability to paint whatever component they need on the Retool canvas but there will of course be scenarios where retool isn't the right choice. We also build escape hatches where you can write JavaScript anywhere in Retool. We like to think we can cover a very broad base, especially in the scenarios in which Retool excels today.
                                  • cjonas 2 years ago
                                    Can you write well structured and reusuable code on retool? Can I write it in vscode, maybe even in typescript and deploy it up?

                                    Most implementations of the "escape hatch" I've come across require scattering fragmented snippets across the project with no support for building out well structured and reusuable code.

                                    • manmal 2 years ago
                                      I applaud your efforts, and I will consider Retool for small projects (PoCs etc). If that's the niche you are aiming for, perfect.
                                  • moneywoes 2 years ago
                                    Isn’t retool a multi billion org? I wouldn’t classify that as failing
                                    • 2 years ago
                                      • yen789 2 years ago
                                        It used to be like that in the past, but now it's changing... For example Qonto, Spendesk - fintech unicorns, so rather serious companies - rely on Forest Admin. And if you talk to ops people using natively built internal tools, they typically complain about them a lot.
                                      • C_NOXS 2 years ago
                                        Ive used retool for 5 years now and the new addition of Retool Mobile has been extremely useful for us in the past few months. The scanner and the camera components are especially useful and I think can have many potential uses in the near future for us.
                                        • sirjaz 2 years ago
                                          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
                                          • cuffe 2 years ago
                                            Retool PM here - we're working on tablets right now but have also considered opening up to desktop apps. Are there any particularly use cases you're thinking of where you'd need desktop over web?
                                            • Cwizard 2 years ago
                                              You can access a web version from desktop right? In my experience a web version is more accessible than a desktop version. A significant percentage of desktops are locked down: schools, libraries, internet cafes, corporates, …

                                              Is there much of a market left for non-compute intensive desktop apps? Or desktop apps that are a flagship product (slack client, zoom client, etc) but would you use a low code tool for that?

                                            • zbruhnke 2 years ago
                                              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 :/
                                              • glenngillen 2 years ago
                                                I’ve no association with Retool, but used to lead product for a popular thing that had both cloud and on-prem options.

                                                On-prem is a real pain in terms of delivery. For a lot of customers there’s long lead times and change management processes to navigate to upgrade to a new version. There’s a wide distribution of environments and network topologies that introduce often surprising edge cases. There’s a whole lot you don’t control or don’t have visibility into. Which is almost by design and perfectly fine - it’s why the customer chose on-prem!

                                                But… the trade off is you really want high conviction your new feature is perfect before it goes on-prem. You can just flip a feature flag to temporarily roll back some capability if you uncover an issue. It might take your customer months to negotiate with their internal stakeholders a deployment window for an upgrade.

                                                Now obviously that’s not true of all on-prem customers. But it was true for such a large percentage of them that it was more pragmatic to accept it as the general case rather than have a higher velocity flow for the handful that would adopt new capabilities at a pace closer to Cloud customers.

                                                • mikelikespie 2 years ago
                                                  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.
                                                  • jaxn 2 years ago
                                                    Damn that is good customer service. I like how y’all do things at Retool.
                                                    • what-no-tests 2 years ago
                                                      What is an AE?
                                                    • zbruhnke 2 years ago
                                                      sweet! reaching out now!
                                                  • alexashka 2 years ago
                                                    I watched the demo video - there seem to be some UI jitters with the list view when you click 'update' - you can see it at 4:25-4:26.

                                                    Is that the list going blank for a fraction of a second? If so, that is jarring - is this a limitation of React Native or what's going on there?

                                                    • shawiz 2 years ago
                                                      Thanks for catching! This is a legit issue with our list view and we are looking into a fix at the moment :)
                                                    • ushakov 2 years ago
                                                      Is it me or does the person presenting look uncanny, almost like a 3D avatar?
                                                      • naiveai 2 years ago
                                                        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.
                                                        • krithix 2 years ago
                                                          (I work at Retool.) Ankur is definitely a real engineer (and also a very nice human) who works at Retool! https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankur-rastogi/
                                                          • thiht 2 years ago
                                                            Not sure if it's just me but the audio is completely unsynchronized from the video, maybe it's related?
                                                            • ssddanbrown 2 years ago
                                                              Feels and sounds like it might be sped-up just a touch, therefore making it seem unnatural?
                                                            • semireg 2 years ago
                                                              What does “Zebra” mean in this context?

                                                              > Native mobile components include a barcode scanner, camera, NFC reader, geolocation tracker, signature pad, and Zebra integration to allow you to fully enable your field teams to operate efficiently.

                                                              The only mention of Zebra in the docs is for zebra striping table rows/lists.

                                                              Or does it mean Zebra printer for label printing via ZPL?

                                                              My wheelhouse is label printer integration, so I’m naturally drawn to printer vocabulary.

                                                              If anyone is in the market for a zebra label printer design app and API based rendering, check out my app at https://label.live/

                                                              • shawiz 2 years ago
                                                                Hi semireg, Zebra integration is a new feature we recently launched, and it means deploying Retool Mobile apps on Zebra devices (zebra.com), and utilizes Zebra's native scanners. We are still working on the documentation for it and it doesn't show up on the docs yet. If you're interested, happy to discuss with you more.
                                                              • splitrocket 2 years ago
                                                                Well done team! Cant' wait for a map component!
                                                                • mikelikespie 2 years ago
                                                                  Thanks! We're working on the map component right now, so stay tuned.
                                                                • rubenfiszel 2 years ago
                                                                  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 2 years ago
                                                                    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 :)
                                                                    • rubenfiszel 2 years ago
                                                                      Thanks, not yet but that's mostly because we don't have the throughput. If you're serious about this, hit us on our discord which you can find easily and let's make it happen!
                                                                  • 2 years ago
                                                                    • matlin 2 years ago
                                                                      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...

                                                                      • flakiness 2 years ago
                                                                        > "Skip painful iOS and Android deployments. Ship to the App Store and Google Play Store, or as a PWA in seconds."

                                                                        So it looks like this is mostly web-based and the app is just a wrapper. Then the app store ban isn't a big deal. They just use it through the Web (PWA).

                                                                        • babyshake 2 years ago
                                                                          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 2 years ago
                                                                            I guess even if they do, it's still available as a PWA, so there's that.
                                                                            • k__ 2 years ago
                                                                              As far as I remember, you can onboard a bunch of internal users with TestFlight.
                                                                            • majikandy 2 years ago
                                                                              AppSheet do it too and they are owned by Google now, if Apple lets Google do it, I’d think Retool are fine?
                                                                              • pmontra 2 years ago
                                                                                Not necessarily. Apple can make a specific deal with Google that go beyond the general terms of service of the App Store. This applies to any pair of other companies and any service owned by one of them. It's not different from an AGPL project offering commercial licenses for using the source code in a proprietary way.

                                                                                Furthermore there are some apps that Apple can't do without to be able to sell their devices IMHO. Examples: Gmail, video streaming services, banking. If any of those apps from well entrenched incumbents won't like to play by the rules I think that Apple has to make a special deal with them or risk losing sales to Android competitors.

                                                                                Smaller companies don't have any leverage.

                                                                              • 2 years ago
                                                                              • john2hughes 2 years ago
                                                                                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.
                                                                                • mikelikespie 2 years ago
                                                                                  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.
                                                                                  • 2 years ago
                                                                                    • smt88 2 years ago
                                                                                      [flagged]
                                                                                      • dvdhsu 2 years ago
                                                                                        (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!

                                                                                        • 2 years ago
                                                                                          • 2 years ago
                                                                                          • pvg 2 years ago
                                                                                            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 2 years ago
                                                                                              [flagged]
                                                                                            • phphphphp 2 years ago
                                                                                              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.
                                                                                              • Zababa 2 years ago
                                                                                                > 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.

                                                                                            • croes 2 years ago
                                                                                              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 2 years ago
                                                                                                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.

                                                                                                • shawiz 2 years ago
                                                                                                  The video is fixed now
                                                                                                  • croes 2 years ago
                                                                                                    Thank you
                                                                                                • 2 years ago
                                                                                                • esprehn 2 years ago
                                                                                                  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.
                                                                                                • stavros 2 years ago
                                                                                                  This feels like the wrong use for Show HN, no?
                                                                                                  • dang 2 years ago
                                                                                                    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

                                                                                                    • 2 years ago
                                                                                                    • croes 2 years ago
                                                                                                      OP seems to be the CEO of Retool.

                                                                                                      Edit: he is the CEO

                                                                                                    • foxbee 2 years ago
                                                                                                      [flagged]
                                                                                                      • dang 2 years ago
                                                                                                        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 2 years ago
                                                                                                          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 2 years ago
                                                                                                            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.