Create a ‘dark app’ to power your business, team, or project.

Glide allows anyone to create amazing mobile apps without writing code, using Google Sheets. In this post, I’ll explain a simple yet invaluable app that you will be eager to create as soon as you learn about it, that you can build with Glide in under an hour, that will make you look like a superhero to your colleagues, and that won’t cost you a dime.

Dark Apps

We call internal apps that never reach public app stores “dark apps.” We’ve seen companies build tens or hundreds of dark apps — so many that there are entire internal app stores full of dark apps.

So what dark app does your company need, that you can create today with Glide, for free? An app that puts your key business metrics a single tap away on every employee’s smartphone. Our version of this app is called Inside Glide:

Actual numbers obscured.

This is our most vital dark app. We use it to continuously monitor our key metrics: conversion of website visitors to active developers, developer retention, app stickiness, trending apps, and financial metrics. It also contains an employee directory, and is protected with email login so only employees can open it.

This app took one day to make, required no programming, and cost nothing.

How would your business benefit if everyone in your company had an app like this on their phone homescreen, and could view these numbers at any time with one tap? Can you afford not to find out?

You can easily create your own version of this app right now, for free:

1. Create a Google Sheet (tip: just enter sheet.new in your URL bar!)
2. Use the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on to periodically bring Google Analytics reports into your sheet.
3. Create charts in your sheet of your key metrics.
4. Publish each chart as an image.
5. Create a Glide app to display the chart images.
6. Share the Glide app with your colleagues.

That’s it! You’re a dark app wizard! Please let us know how your app is received by mentioning @glideapps on Twitter.

More About Glide

We created Glide after watching hundreds of companies burn mountains of cash to build internal mobile apps that invariably turn out poorly. Those same companies benefit enormously from spreadsheets that are buildable by practically anyone and cost almost nothing to create. We wondered whether spreadsheets — the most successful programming tool of all time — could be used to create apps for smartphones — the most successful computers of all time. Glide is the exploration of this world-changing idea. Try it now!