Thunkable Future Considerations

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I just read this

and more specifically this part quoted below

The Future of Thunkable Classic Android

During the coming months, we plan on building out Thunkable ✕ to become the most powerful app building platform. This includes adding dozens of new components and features, such as AdMob, bluetooth, blockchain, texting, cloud services, gaming components, etc.

When we do this, we anticipate most folks will move over to Thunkable ✕ , since it will be better — more features, cross-platform, large gallery, etc.

Assuming this all goes well, we plan to stop supporting Thunkable Classic Android in late 2019, and dedicate 100% of our resources to Thunkable ✕ .

We are actively in the process of growing our engineering team, so we hope to be able to launch features sooner rather than later.

The big question is: what does it mean “stop supporting Thunkable Classic”?

As I see it there are two main paths to go:

  1. Stop development on Thunkable Classic but continue to exist as a platform
  2. Stop development and entirely remove the platform from existing…

From my point of view

I don’t mind if the 1st option is followed at all!!! But going on with the 2nd option is creating some serious issues for some of us…
OK I understand the fact that there is a huge investment of Thunkable X and @Thunkable wants to fully commit to this BUT some of us have built with Classic and published to Play Store a few apps (or we intend to) and we might need to support them afterwards

Porting some of these apps to other platforms is very difficult due to several differences between the platforms and it is seriously ridiculous to force us to redesign them from scratch again elsewhere…

To conclude

I hope that you will go with option 2 of leaving Classic to exist but stop supporting it…
Which is more or less the same to what is happening currently…

In any other case several users (including myself) will go to other platforms that are still “classic” oriented and in the worst case we will rebuild everything from scratch…

I don’t want to pay a subscription to keep my projects and ideas private and mainly I don’t need to create cross platform apps, therefore it is highly unlikely to use X…

It is sad to be a “Power Thunker” and saying such things…,
I have spent several hours in here to see what’s going on and help others and learn stuff but I have no contract to use this platform and participate to this community.

After all we all choose to pursue our best interests…

Best regards…

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I 100% agree.

late 2019

is still a while to go, but it will be a major break in some of my projects

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Not only you.
Also, read the comments from well-known members of the community under the Official topic. You’ll see we’re not alone with this viewpoint.

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I don’t know what your background is (I mean professionally) and I have no idea how old may you be or what your educational background is…

I am 38 yrs old and my day to day job is auditing Financial Statements that companies are going to publish.
I have a Master in Business Administration and a professional qualification from ACCA in audit (strong business skills as you can understand).

Based on this experience I can assure you that

  • when any corporation is announcing a significant diversification of his operations then it is already done…
  • when a huge investment is made, getting money back is expected…
  • when you commit to a time plan i.e. 2019 then it is a fact that the wheel has already turned…

I have read the comments from other members under the official topic of the announcement and I see that we all share the same POV.

Now let me predict the future for you:

  • Thunkable users that are now well known are already members to other communities and platforms and they will start to be more active there
  • Thunkable proceeding this way will certainly loose several members that are currently significantly active
  • New members will join that will not have the memory of how Thunkable was some time ago so no complains will exist
  • Thunkable will continue as something entirely different and earn money from it
  • Everyone lived happily ever after…

I don’t imply that making money is bad, or that Thunkable is wrong for wanting to profit from it.

I certainly don’t like the masked reply that “we are trying to increase knowledge of all members that’s why we will make all projects visible to anyone and if you want to keep it for yourself pay us 20$/month or 100$/yr and we will also give you 3 months free subscription”

I would rather hear the naked truth that “we invested money and we want to get them back with a premium”

Personal impact

When I read the announcement I was just sceptic about continuing to develop my projects in Thunkable or start some new ones.

Now I am sure that there is no reason to do so…

I have 4 projects that I need to maintain with Thunkable

  • Bar-QR Manager
  • Yiang (Dice Poker)
  • Car Finder
  • Accounts manager - unpublished

From these the first 2 need to be revised so as to comply to the regulations from store, the third is ok.
After that I will stop supporting or upgrading them…

For Accounts Manager which is my most advanced app ever made after the last major upgrade of Thunkable in August

  • no support exists for issues with companion freaking out when changing properties
  • since then Firebase and AdMobs are crashing the app after compiling apk (the reply here was that these are experimental features and they can break while in other platforms are simply advanced components and are still working)

I will transport this elsewhere even if I need to redesign it from scratch (although this might not be necessary)

I think that by 2019 I will have managed to do it, so I will not have the need to have Classic version still alive…

However I want to thank the community for this 1 yr and something that I have participated.
I have learned a lot but I have not earned any money even if my published apps have ads in.
I hope I have helped as much as possible.

I will join the community from time to time to see what is going on but I will limit my looooong posts to virtually nothing, I will become simply a member and not a Regular or Power Thunker.
I wish you all the best and I will see you in other communities that I know that you are members also.

One last question, should we send back the Thunkable t-shirt or we can keep it???
When I received it I was proud to put it on and go outside for a walk, who believes that it is the same now?

I simply don’t like to be sold out like this by anyone

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Glad to hear that this raises eyebrows of others too.

Exactly. My main problems will not be the components that are incompatible to other platforms, but compiling an app with the same keystore and package name. The font import feature is neat and I used it very much.

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ok but I think that you should quote this also…

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I am searching to understand some differences between platforms and I saw this
image
I believe you understand where this screenshot is from…

would not this help to do the trick??

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Sure I know that. I just wanted to point out that everybody who uses Thunkable Classic in production has to deal with this problems. There are many ways to do it, but changing the builder requires deleting Thunkable exclusive components to increase compatibility. We as Power Thunkers have to start a thread to inform everybody about this problems and what one can do about it.

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Today I tried to transfer my project to another platform, but I did it but I had to remove some components but it works.

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Integrate BLochchain, will be the best feature. What are you planning, How do you want integrate Blockchain. Some Details pls!

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don’t expect new items to be integrated, the team is discussing about stopping support of classic platform…

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I am totally agree with @Red_Panda, we should start a new thread on which components are exclusive to Thunkable so we can move our current projects to other platform(s).
Could you inform us which components you had to remove?

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Look at my comparisonlist to see what builder has what component. But some components have the same name but should be removed anyway. All the monitization components for instance.

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I had to remove: FAB, Push Notifications (OneSignal) and Switch.

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You should remove everything that is not standard App Inventor.

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We are still supporting Thunkable Classic and we just fixed a bug -

http://community.thunkable.com/t/i-cant-open-pdf-file-from-internal-storage/40551/49?u=wei

Best,
Wei

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@wei

Yes, only to know that, in few coming days these all things would be lost :slightly_frowning_face:

Actually I didn’t get the reason behind posting this reply of yours to this and couple of other topics :thinking:

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What do you mean by lost ? We are still here to support Classic.

As for multiple postings, just want to make sure people see them :slight_smile:

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So, will we have to migrate our applications to another builder? :scream:

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@wei

Yes I know this :point_up_2: and so I said this :point_down:

And,

By lost I only meant quitting the support for Thunkable Classic.
Sorry if its meaning was misunderstood.

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