1 Million Apps on Glitch: The Creative Web is Back!

We’re excited to reach the **one million app **milestone as it shows how we’ve created the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate online. With functionality like real-time collaborative editing, instant deployment, automatic secure hosting and Rewind, we’ve removed many of the technical barriers to getting started with building on the web. By turning “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools, we’ve enabled people of any skill level to be able to create online.

So it makes sense that the millionth Glitch app was created by someone who’s learning to code. freeCodeCamp is a community that helps you learn to code and get experience by contributing to open source projects used by nonprofits. And it was a freeCodeCamp student learning Node.js used Glitch who created the project that marked the million-app milestone. freeCodeCamp was an early adopter of Glitch and their community members use it extensively to learn back-end development, testing, and security. Their approach is hands-on — through coding challenges and building projects, you learn to code, which is exactly the type of thing we wanted to help make more accessible when we set out building Glitch.

And best of all, those beginning coders like knowing that when they use Glitch, they’re using a tool that even some of the most experienced professional developers also use for their work.

But Glitch is about more than apps. It’s helping people create the best of the web by enabling creativity like no tool has done before. Or, at least not since GeoCities. But most people on the web today weren’t around for the heyday of GeoCities, or NeoPets, or MySpace, or any of the other places where an earlier generation of creators got their start dabbling with code. They’ve never known a truly creative web, having grown up on an internet dominated by major social networks.

So we’re bringing that creative, personal, human web back.

With this milestone, we’re showing how a creative community can change the way the web is made to be more open and inclusive, and can come together to invent the cutting edge of the web. Glitch is a place where you’ll find cool apps, websites, and creations that you simply can’t find anywhere else. Think of this community’s future as being like YouTube, but for apps, bots, web art and VR instead of just videos.

We’ve been working hard to make it a welcoming community, whether you’re an experienced professional developer or you’re just getting started. A community where everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves and sharing their creations with the world. And in doing so we’re reminding some, and introducing others, to a fun, creative web that any of us can build. And it’s working. The result is: we’re growing fast!

We love Glitch and we want to do this thing right. We think that means remaining fiercely independent and opinionated. Now, we’re not some flighty startup — Glitch is bootstrapped by Fog Creek Software, the inventors of Trello and co-creators of Stack Overflow. We’re not building Glitch just so we can sell it to some big company in a year and let the community fall apart.

But running Glitch this way brings up an important issue: sustainability. How does a tiny little team support a huge community that’s going to change the web? Well, we’re going to need your help to get the word out about Glitch. We’re committed to making this a sustainable business for the long term. And we’ll be doing this in a few ways, but the first is with Glitch Teams.

From development and DevRel, to marketing and learning, we know many of you love Glitch too and want to use it at work. So we’re building our roadmap around the tools that help you adopt Glitch within your organization. We’re doing this based on feedback direct from the community, and it will include the things you’ve been asking for, such as:

• Team Member Authentication: Flexible, integrated authentication with providers that your team already uses to track and manage team members
• **Flexible Project Permissions: **Control over who can access or update different projects and pages
• **Team Pages: **Enabling discovery, remixing and reuse of private apps within teams
• **Notifications: **Get notified about key events as they happen on Glitch But we’re keen to know what else your team would find valuable enough to pay for.

Then please get back to building one of the next million apps on Glitch. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎆

We’ll be hosting a special event soon with the Glitch team, where you can ask us anything about the community, Glitch Teams and the future of Glitch itself.