I'm currently playing with Zoho Creator as an alternative to AppSheet. So far, I've been impressed. But my trial will elapse soon so I'm interested in hearing from others who may have experience in both platforms about the "gotchas" that may lay ahead.
If you're curious, here are some examples of things that I always seem to trip over in AppSheet:
Creating a multi-selectable, bi-directional relationship between related records. In AppSheet, this involves creating a join table and, if you want to be able to select multiple related records at once, creating a field to store a list of these records and then a bot to keep the join table updated or creating an appscript to do the work. In Zoho, you just configure a lookup field and you're done. Oh, and if I happen to want something other than the label from the related records to appear in the selector, I don't have to store a virtual field to hold the desired selector label value - that's configurable too.
Creating new records in table B based on a selection of records from Table A and some new details that I will be prompted to provide. In a real world scenario, selecting multiple people and creating new work records for each. In Appsheet, primarily because input() doesn't work with the create new records action, I need to create placeholder fields in table A configure multiple actions and a bot for this to work. If I happen to be using a Google Sheets source, I would probably use an appscript instead. In Zoho, I think I can do this with a simple script regardless of where I store the data.
Predictable Desktop Interface: I love the look of AppSheet and my clients do to. But they work almost exclusively on desktop, and there are too many times where the view I get on desktop from AppSheet is not what I expect. I've spent too many hours trying to second guess some of the system-generated views that appear or what the rules are for when a view of my making will take the place of a system generated view. Zoho doesn't seem to have these issues.
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