Launching an official Airtable App: A trial by fire 🔥

We just launched our first Airtable App. I wanted to share what we learned.

Build an airtable app.

There are so many companies waiting to be built in the Airtable ecosystem.

Airtable launched their Custom Apps SDK just last year, and if you look at the Airtable Marketplace, the shelves are still pretty empty.

There is a tremendous opportunity for developers to build little React apps that can help this community of over 250K companies build better. Sure, there is no way to commercialize in the marketplace yet, but you can set up payments outside of Airtable without a hitch. So if you have the skills, get in there!

I'm not affiliated with Airtable, but as apart of the community, I see companies asking for apps that ought to be built all day, everyday. So if you are looking for a problem to solve, join the community and you'll find some good ones.

Three Tips

When you do start building your Airtable App, make sure you test it to their spec and mind the details.

When we submitted our app, we didn't know how thorough the review would be. As a startup we took a lean, iterative approach to our app. We learned that they take the review seriously so iterations can take time. An early, complete spec will save you and Airtable time.

For some context, our app is fairly complicated. It allows Airtable users to query their entire base in SQL. On the backend, we literally replicate Airtable to a hosted Postgres database so that in the front end you can easily write SQL queries (with syntax highlighting and autocomplete to boot). We also create a guest account for the Airtable user on our system so the user can access the Postgres database we create for them.

Airtable outlines their review process in detail, but I wanted to call out three key items you should not skip:

(1) Test the app in multiple browsers

We didn't test our app in one browser which obscured a bug that took several emails and about 10 days to sort out with the Airtable team. Airtable has since launched a testing NPM package - use it!

(2) Match the Airtable style guide in both fullscreen and compact views

I appreciate how much Airtable cares about the user experience. To make it consistent, Airtable provides a UI library. And when they review the app, they want everything to be compliant. So use their Figma templates and match their guide. Test your app in every window size.

(3) Minimize network calls...really

Lastly, if your app needs to make external network calls - keep it to the bare minimum. Just make the calls that make your app work. Our app used an NPM package that makes an unnecessary network call - which took time to snuff out.

There is so much opportunity here and not enough developers building! Hopefully this gives you a better sense of what to expect when building an app on Airtable. Yes, there are hoops to jump through - but the docs and process continue to improve. So build!