I'm currently exploring the potential of building enterprise-level applications across various industries using Retool Mobile. I'd love to hear about your experiences—especially with the most complex or advanced apps you've built and have running on Retool.
What challenges did you encounter? Are there specific features or tools you feel are missing from Retool that would significantly enhance its capabilities? Feel free to share any feature requests or ideas you believe Retool should adopt to better serve the needs of enterprise app development.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Additional Context:
Retool's Flexibility: Retool is known for its ability to rapidly create internal tools by connecting to almost any data source (APIs, databases, etc.), but as businesses grow and diversify, the need for more complex, customized features becomes more prominent.
Enterprise Demands: Enterprise applications often require advanced data handling, integrations with various external services, and compliance with stringent security standards. I’d be curious to know how Retool is handling these in real-world, enterprise-grade use cases.
Mobile App Considerations: Retool Mobile is relatively new and mobile app development often requires a distinct approach compared to web apps, particularly in terms of UX, performance, and offline capabilities.
Retool's current strengths and potential areas for improvement, I will likely receive valuable input from the community that could influence feature development or guide.
I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but here are some subjects we find challenging:
On security: I was wondering how to make it comply with EU rules on client health data and privacy. Sometimes you need an offline app that can be used by employees. Disconnecting it from the internet will limit the risk of data theft by non-employees.
You could use retool on premise for that. But right now I read somewhere that for retool mobile you still need a connection to the internet for validating the license/be able to use it. Perhaps this is for all retool apps, mobile or otherwise. The way this might be mitigated by retool is by having the license checked every x days/week. Also based on the billing cycle. That way on prem can be really offline in the future. Disclaimer: I haven’t tested it. I just read it on this forum somewhere that an internet connection is required.
Performance: now with multipage/multiscreen we see a jump in performance. This is really needed. Our apps feel slow because of the many components we use. The web version of retool mobile runs faster and it’s not really an issue.
For example, the custom collection list item here consists of 58 components. Mainly containers. Just to get it look like this. To get all the data displayed and still get the experience right and keep it snappy is a challenge.
Components: We’ve used the nfc reader for check-ins for users as a pilot. But the results on Android is sometimes unexpected. Also on some devices it’s really slow that it’s unusable and sometimes an annoyance for users.
With the scanner we have some troubles with it scanning multiple times or not at all. Due to light conditions or device performance. If you want to be able to continuously scan, you want to avoid duplicates (same object) but you want to be able to scan duplicate barcodes to be able to warn the user of mistakes. As of now we’re not able to alter or finetune the scanner component in that matter. Also we don’t have the settings to disable 2D or QR code. It scans everything. Sometimes multiple barcodes and QR codes and duplicates in one go.
Because of this reason we still rely on an external scanner and just past the value in an input field.
These are some limitations in components we found.
As of features we are missing: a good OCR tool/resource that’s easy to use and tweak. Right now we use AI for it. But it should be faster if its main task is OCR.
