Show HN: Toga – Create apps from Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Toga – Create apps from Google Sheets

toga.tech

130 pointsdavyson32 comments

Sam, one of the creators here. Spreadsheets are still the most flexible software creation tool in existence. Excel and now Google Sheets allow millions of non developers to produce software within their workbooks. However while spreadsheets are great experiences for authoring tools, they aren't so easy for your users.

Toga allows you to create apps from your Google Sheets so you can provide an easy interface for your team (or even your customers and partners) to access, edit and create data. Permissions are integrated to you can limit by the sheet, column and row.

I'd love to hear what you think!

I'm really hoping one of these types of app builders backed by spreadsheets takes off. Not only will it empower non-devs, it will give devs the ability to prototype and iterate faster. Toga looks especially well thought out.

Are there plans/a path in the future where users can move off of spreadsheets to a relational database when the need arises?

Yes absolutely, we're working on a way to let people graduate to a flexible database.

I love the app idea. Will give it a deeper look in the morning. But why did you delete the email column?

I absolutely love this! Personally I have made a few projects that use google sheets as a backend in order to give the non-dev owners control over their data.

I wonder if in this app you'll have some API access? I can see this a extremely useful to hand non-technical clients a very nice interface (better than a spread sheet) and avoid the user from breaking the app (i.e. "I didn't know that rearranging/changing the name of a column would break the app!")

I'm gonna keep an eye on this product. Thanks!

Hi Sam. We maintain a spreadsheet here of our COVID-19 cases and related data around them. Curious to see what kind of engagement we can do with Toga.

Congrats on launching! Have you heard of Glide: https://www.glideapps.com/? How are you thinking of differentiating yourself from them and others?

Glide is really great at making utility mobile apps on Google Sheets. We see Toga as being used more for your business system, so Toga works in desktop and mobile and has the really fine grained permissions needed to make business systems work.

Am I missing something? I used to run a fairly large landscaping company with a partner out of gSheets so I was excited when I saw this. But at the moment this just seems like a wrapper that takes away most of the useful functionality of a spreadsheet. I could see something like this being great if it had integrations with payroll, accounting, etc software but it currently seems far too basic to be usable.

That seems to be on purpose. They are using the sheet as a database, and abstracting all but the "admin" away from direct access.

Using sheets for the back-end is unusual, but otherwise it's the same space as Knack, Quickbase, Zoho Creator, etc. They are all pretty popular.

I'm biased [1], but agree with serjester -- the spreadsheet needs to be a part of the application authoring process.

For data access, a tool like this needs to support:

- lightweight: the spreadsheet itself

- medium-weight: a built-in set of functions for storing/fetching data (from a built-in, behind-the-scenes DB)

- heavyweight: functions for accessing data in an existing corporate DB, queue (Kafka, JMS, etc), and other sources in real-time

[1] Founder of https://mintdata.com, where we think spreadsheets have a bright future in this space :)

What definition of "real-time" are you using here? I presume you're not using the RTOS[] definition, so I'm just curious what workload you would consider "heavyweight" and what kind of real time guarantees that means the ideal system would have.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system

How often does it actually happen that people wonder who deleted a column? Google Sheets has a history and can undo changes.

You're absolutely right. We were just trying to illustrate what "Spreadsheet Hell" is like when you use Google Sheets as a big connected system.

Deleting a column is an illustrative example, but from what I hear from a heavy Sheets user is that it's pretty common on a shared document for people to break formulas. This is harder to notice because formulas are hidden behind selecting a cell, and harder to fix because you don't always know when it was broken to fix from history.

I'd imagine there's a wide practive of having sanity check indicators in spreadsheets. I wonder if there is tooling support for this in current products like gsheets?

This is great. This is basically Airtable, but a more dummy-proof interface. I wish the landing page showed more screenshots of the admin interface, the config steps I need to go through to generate a Toga app.

I've seen before AppSheet [1] acquired by Google, however, it seems that it supports just mobile apps

Your solution looks interesting, especially if it has an easy to use interface like bubble [2] to create the website and also mobile app

[1] https://www.appsheet.com [2] https://bubble.io/

What is the pricing?

Without it I cannot suggest it to my deep pocketed enterprise clients, and I cannot ever consider for my own bootstrapped, very very shallow pocketed, projects.

I had the same question, but noticed they have pricing at:

https://stacker.app/pricing

for a related project, from the same company. Perhaps pricing will be in a similar ballpark?

At MintData [1], we get this asked a lot too, and honestly

- how long the company has been in business - the existing customer base w/references - the ability of the vendor to support enterprise customers & their needs

tends to play a bigger role for making a go/no-go decision, in our experience.

[1] https://mintdata.com

If you are looking for more advanced apps for complex use cases as opposed to simple single table/sheet data then Axonator.com is a great choice. It allows you to collect more rich data like pictures with annotations, conditional logic, custom backend business logic, drag and drop form builder. Data can go directly into spreadsheets or any databases/APIs. Axonator is different because it allows your to model complex relationships between data tables. With its UI first approach, no knowledge of data modeling is required. It spits out native high performance IOS and Android apps without the hassle of coding. Enterprise are using this tool for quality inspections, surveys and automatically generate PDF reports and display the collected data in the form of insightful dashboards.

Seems extremely similar to Appsheet... what's your differentiator here?

AppSheet apps almost exclusively target mobile users + often for external parties. Toga has desktop and mobile experiences and is primarily designed for internal teams.

If this were very customizable, it would be a powerful way to hack together MVPs or even richly-interactable prototypes for user testing

So it's basically an alternative forms UI for Google Sheets? Something like Google Forms but better?

Considering the date and the love I have for all things spreadsheets, I was hoping for a blank page :)

cool! this can be really good for creating internal company or customer portals similar to the glide. it's always a pain to onboard new teammates or users to built out google sheets the logic/thinking is obscured and hard to learn.

I'd be wary of basing an entire product on another company's product, specially Google.

i see api token in the url when i click on the link to demo site.

Yep... that was our hack to make the demo apps work without passwords. Quick and dirty... but quick.

I would recommend not “hacking” something like this and publically admitting it on HN. Pretty much made me distrust all of your work if you are going to take shortcuts like this that expose your API key. Adding a “taking the time to fix this now” probably would have been sufficient for me to think differently.

Thank you, we will fix.

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