An open letter to all Thunkers and the Thunkable team
Dear all
I recently noticed an increased number of posts by Thunkers who feel that the platform does not live up to its promises and that it is not worth paying for in a manner which can politely be characterized as… impolite.
I have been Thunking for a few months now and paying for a monthly subscription because I prefer to keep my projects private and I truly believe that Thunkable is worth the price it asks for to keep its engine running while trying to pull off something unique which allows people who simply can’t or don’t want to code to develop apps and unleash their creativity.
So recently I noticed an increasing number of posts which I believe cross the line and express criticism in ways which I believe are unfair. Arguments along the lines of “Thunkable is only good for Hello World types of apps” and that “The Thunkable support is crap” are so, so unfair. People who think like that most probably have false expectations or are not willing to spend time to find out which are the available tools the platform offers and how to use them creatively to overcome limitations which is exactly what computer programming is about anyway!
Thunkable enables you to create cross-platform apps very easily comparing to native coding (seriously, have you seen what it takes to create a button that actually does something in XCode? Hilarious!!!) but it is not perfect. Perfection does not exist btw… Thunkable does NOT enable you to click a button and create the new Facebook app… If you think it does, get real bro! You still need to learn how think like a coder but with the benefit of not having to write a single line of code. You still need to learn how to handle JSON objects which is not hard at all btw! You still need to understand the implications of your app design and this takes time. If you are not willing to do so, try using Ionic, Xamarin, PhoneGap, heck, code native XCode and Java and then you will appreciate what Thunkable does! Go ahead!
Could things be improved? You bet! There is always room for improvement but that does not mean that you can’t create great apps with Thunkable. The community is doing great job in supporting new users (big respect to @actech, @kartik14 and others I forget to mention) and of course the entire Thunkable team.
Thunkable is not perfect. There are plenty of bugs on Git, many of which remain un-processed for quite some time while at the same time new features are being introduced. And yes, sometimes new releases break things that previously worked but you know what? Tough $hit! No one can claim it is done intentionally. I don’t know how many people are behind Thunkable but they deserve an upvote for their effort.
That’s all… I am now going back to Thunking…
Konstantinos
P.S. No, I did not get paid to write this. I just can’t cope with reading flames from people who don’t know what they are talking about. If you are reading this and you feel you are one of them, drop a message in the forum and we will try to help you. We are here to be part of the solution, not the problem.