Customizing your Bubble App

Bubble allows you to do a lot with the app that you’re developing. From configuring APIs to managing entire databases, all without code. Bubble also allows you to customize your app further by tweaking some of the finer technical details.

Bubble allows you to manage your app’s visibility, domain name, email, password policy, and more through the customization menu. The customization menu can be accessed via the application settings in the settings tab. You can tweak app-wide options via customizations, including visual aspects. So if you’re looking to get no-code web development support, you’ve come to the right place.

Public and Private Apps

You can control the visibility of your app in edit-mode from the “application rights” setting. From here you can set it to one of these three settings:

– Private, where only you and Bubble users you’ve invited can edit the application

– Everyone can view, where anyone can see the application and database in edit mode but can’t modify it themselves

– Everyone can edit, where the editor can be seen by anyone and used by anyone to modify the app

Note that only the master owner can edit this setting, even if it’s set to “Everyone can edit”.

In run mode, your app will be visible to anyone who can get or guess the URL regardless of whatever your edit mode privacy setting is. You can; however, impose password protection on your app to control access to only the people who you communicate the username and password with. This setting can be found under the “Limit access to this app in run mode with a username and password” label.

You can also decide to limit this protection to development mode only, allowing you to hide only the latest development changes while keeping your Live production version open to your users.

Domain and DNS

Your Bubble app will automatically come with a bubbleapps.io subdomain that you get to choose when you first create your app. If you want to change this so that you can use your own domain name, you can use the Domain section of the Settings tab.

You can use a domain that you own with any registrar service by first entering the domain in the input box under the relevant tab and clicking “Set up this domain”. Bubble will then provide the DNS records that you will need to enter on the registrar’s end. You can then head to the registrar service for your domain, find the DNS section and replace the entries there with the records Bubble gave you.

You might need to contact your registrar service for help, since each registrar uses a different interface. Also note that it may take some time to see your domain update as the new settings propagate across the internet.

Email New applications can send emails to users via the out-of-the-box admin-no-reply@bubble.io address. This is a Sendgrid email address to help you get started while your app doesn’t use a custom domain. This email is limited; however, and can only send to a maximum of 50 recipients per email.

To change this email you’re going to need to set up a custom domain. Refer to the above tutorial for that. Once you have a custom domain, Bubble allows you to use Sendgrid to send emails with your own domain.

You’ll first need to create an account with Sendgrid. They’ll then give you an API key which you’ll need to input in the Domain tab of your Bubble app’s settings. A validation email will be sent to the email associated with the Sendgrid account, and then you’ll be able to designate a Sendgrid template for your emails and modify the alias of the admin email.

Password Policy

Your app’s password policy will allow you to enforce a set of guidelines for your users’ passwords to ensure they’re secure. This feature can be activated under the General section of the Settings tab under the label “Define a password policy”.

Under the checkbox activating the feature, you’ll be able to change your password policy. You can require a minimum length, or specific characters such as a number, a capital letter, and a non-alphanumeric character.

Visual Settings

Another set of customizations you can make for your app includes the visual settings. These allow you to customize the visual properties of your app on all devices, including special parameters for iOS devices. All of these settings can help you make a Bubble app reskin for yourself and your users.

For the general appearance, you can customize the favicon, or the image displayed in the tab on browsers. A square image is recommended for better visual effect.

You can also change the appearance of the app’s status bar, which indicates the progress of certain processes in your app like workflows or file uploads. You can change the color, and even the transparency for when you decide not to show it to your users.

Bubble also displays a spinning loading icon when loading repeating groups to indicate to the users that it’s still loading and to show them progress while they wait. You can change the color of the spinner under the same group of settings as the rest of the visual settings. Like with the status bar, you can change the color and transparency.

You can also customize the appearance of your app on iOS devices, allowing you to customize the appearance without having to deal with meta tags. You can upload images to serve as home screen icons, and startup images on different orientations and devices. You can also prevent users from zooming in and out of your app via a checkbox in the app.

All these customizations can go a long way towards making your app more accessible, secure, and appealing to your users. These aren’t even all of the customizations you can make for your app. You can modify language and app communications, social networks, and search engine optimization via the customizations that Bubble allows you to make from the Settings tab. As always, if you need more no-code web support, feel free to go to Bubblehelpers for more technical support and tutorial articles.