Announcing Glide — Amazing apps from Google Sheets
Today we’re launching Glide to make it easy & fun for anyone to create amazing apps without code. Pick a Google Sheet and Glide assembles a polished, data-driven app that you can customize, share with a link, and publish to app stores if you desire. Here’s a demo:
Why Glide?
We hear remarkable app ideas from 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 with tools like Squarespace, so why can’t they make apps?
Even programmers consider apps especially difficult to create. Our team spent the last decade building developer tools, and we’ve watched thousands of developers struggle to design, implement, and maintain apps. Most developers we know avoid making mobile apps altogether.
We were dismayed to find that there are hundreds of ‘low-code app builders’, but none that excited us. Why hasn’t anyone made the Google Docs or Figma of apps yet, we wondered. We wanted a modern app builder that we’d love to use, and that would create beautiful, useful apps that we’d be proud to share.
That’s our ambition. Glide makes app development web-based, collaborative*, 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 amazing apps without code.
What are people building?
So far we’ve seen people build company directories, HR apps, financial management apps, special interest apps for small groups, apps for school projects, CRM, and many more special-purpose apps that surprise & delight us daily.
We’re hard at work adding interactive components like Chat, the ability to edit content, and more customization.
How Glide uses Glide to build Glide
We were impressed to find Glide apps useful even as we worked on an early version. 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 apps for friends & family.
We’ve prepared a few samples that you can copy and customize to get started quickly:
Company Guide
Companies often begin using Glide by creating an employee directory. After copying the sample, you can collaborate on content in the Google Sheet with your colleagues, and get creative by adding a calendar view of upcoming birthdays or an on-boarding guide. Copy ‘Employees’ in Glide.
Objectives
We use Objectives to plan & track our work by objective, person, and date. Copy ‘Objectives’ in Glide.
Investors
We made a private app for our investors and advisors with live charts, monthly updates, demo videos, and the ability to comment and contact us from the app. Copy ‘Investors’ in Glide.
Why now?
The sun is rising on no-code tools. We’re honored to be a part of a sea change that will give more & different people access to the technologies that shape our world.
Thank you, we can’t wait to see what you build!
* Upcoming.
