Glide Mobile App Builder: A Snag List Photo App for a Building Firm

Yes, once you pick the right Glide. Glide Classic keeps the snag list in your own Google Sheet: Maker at $49 a month billed yearly suits staff on personal emails, Business from $199 suits company emails. GlideOS, the newer AI builder from $25 a month, copies a sheet in and does not write back to it.

Both products produce web apps that staff add to the phone's home screen, not app-store downloads, and Glide's help pages describe caching rather than offline working, so plan on needing a signal. That decides where it suits: new-build plots with coverage, yes; a basement plant room, only with a paper fallback. AI helps in two places. A chat assistant designs the sheet before you build anything, and Glide Classic's own AI columns can sort entries by trade and turn voice notes into text.

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Which Glide: Classic with a Google Sheet, or GlideOS

Glide now sells two separate products. Its own site steers new customers to GlideOS, which its documentation calls the next generation of Glide, and describes Glide Classic as the original no-code builder with its own plans. That is a different thing from the older "Classic Apps" format, which Glide retired in June 2025, so a search that turns up that notice is not about the product below. Existing Glide Classic apps keep working, new Classic accounts are still sold, and the two products cannot share data or be migrated between each other with any tool Glide offers, according to its pricing FAQ. The differences that matter to a building firm are below, taken from Glide's pricing pages and documentation.

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The prices come from the Glide Classic pricing page and the GlideOS pricing page. If the office already runs jobs from a Google Sheet and the snag list has to land in it, Classic is the fit, and the rest of this build uses it. If you have no sheet and want an agent to produce a first version in an afternoon, GlideOS Basic is the cheaper experiment, but treat the result as a new system rather than a front end for your sheet. A short section near the end covers that route. For a wider comparison with a similar builder, see Glide vs Softr for a client portal.

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Design the snag sheet before you open Glide

The sheet is the app. Every screen you build later reads from it, so a sloppy sheet gives a sloppy app, and renaming columns once screens exist can leave them pointing at the wrong place. Glide Classic takes one spreadsheet per app, so put everything in tabs of one file: Snags, Plots, Users and, later, ClientView. Spreadsheet data is capped at 25,000 rows across all tables, far above what a firm logging a few hundred snags a month will reach, but worth knowing before you paste in ten years of history. Ask a chat assistant to draft the structure first.

I run a six-person building firm finishing 12 houses on one site.
Design a Google Sheet for a snag list that site staff will fill in on
their phones. Return: (1) the tab names; (2) the column headings for
each tab, in order; (3) the allowed values for every dropdown; (4)
formulas for the snag ID and for days open. One photo before and one
after per snag. Use plain names. Do not add columns for costs or for
personal data such as phone numbers.

After a round or two of corrections, a Snags tab like the one below is the version worth building. It is the filled-in template, not a blank one, and the formulas assume headings in row 1.

Three row examples show how it reads: S-0001, Plot 4, Kitchen, "worktop edge chipped by the sink", Carpenter, Before handover, Open; S-0002, Plot 4, Hall, "light switch loose in the wall", Electrician, Safety, Assigned; S-0003, Plot 7, Bed 2, "paint run on the skirting", Decorator, Cosmetic, Fixed - check needed.

A first answer from an assistant can need corrections, and four are worth watching for. It makes the photo columns plain text instead of image columns. It invents a status such as "Done" in place of your four. It adds "Cost to fix" and "Client phone" columns against the instruction, and both are risky in a sheet that client logins may download from. And it puts the ID formula in an array in A2, which can collide with new rows Glide writes. Glide's documentation warns that formulas sitting in apparently empty rows can push new rows far down the sheet, so if that happens, delete the empty rows or move the ID and days-open sums into Glide's own computed columns. For more on writing sheet formulas with AI, see Google Sheets AI prompts.

Build the staff app: add a snag, take the photo, see the list

In the Glide dashboard choose New app, pick Google Sheets as the data source, then select your file. Glide builds a starter app from the sheet, and you shape it into four screens.

1. Add screen. A Form Container with Plot, Room, What is wrong, Trade and Priority, plus an Image Picker bound to Photo before. In the picker settings, set the image source to camera only, so nobody uploads an old gallery photo as fresh evidence.
2. Home screen. A Collection (card or list style) of snags, with the search bar on and a user-facing filter on Status and on Plot. Sort by Priority and then by Days open, so safety items rise to the top.
3. Detail screen. Show both photos, the description and the status. Add a "Mark fixed" button using a Set Column Value action that changes Status to "Fixed - check needed", and an Image Picker for Photo after on the same screen.
4. Manager button. "Close snag" sets Status to Closed and Closed to the current date. Show it only to users with the Manager role, remembering that a visibility condition hides a button but does not protect data.
5. Sign-in and install. Make the app private and invite staff from the Share panel. Each person opens the link in Safari or Chrome and uses Add to Home Screen.

Two practical details catch people out. First, Glide's help pages warn that a link opened inside another app, such as Instagram, Gmail or Slack, may load in a limited in-app browser that can block camera access. If the Add screen cannot open the camera, tap the menu and choose Open in browser, and tell staff to open the link from the home-screen icon, never from a message. Second, because the data is a Google Sheet, each row holds one image per column, which is why the sheet has separate before and after columns. Several photos per snag need Glide Tables, which store the data inside Glide instead of your sheet.

Test with two phones before anyone else sees it. Add a snag on one, watch it appear on the other, then mark it fixed with a second photo. Glide reloads the sheet when its data changes, so a snag edited by hand in the Google Sheet should also reach the app shortly afterwards, and each of those syncs counts towards the plan's updates.

Status filters and the Friday close-out view

A snag list helps only if someone can see what is still open. Build a manager tab with the Collection grouped by Plot and a filter on Status. For the counts, add a Query column on the Plots tab that finds that plot's snags with one status, then a Rollup column set to Count on top of it, one pair for each status you want to see. Glide also offers a Kanban collection style, one column per status, which suits an office screen better than a phone.

Here is what that tab might show on a Friday in week six of a 12-house handover (illustrative figures; the right-hand columns split the 52 open and assigned snags by trade).

Read it as a manager. Thirty-four snags are waiting for a check, which is a bottleneck in your own office, not with the subcontractors. Fifty-two are still open or assigned, and 19 of those are decorating, so the decorator goes on Monday's plan before anyone else. Sort the home tab by Days open and the snags that have sat longest rise to the top. The same status counts feed a weekly message to clients, and turning snag counts into a weekly client update shows how to write one from these numbers.

A client view that shows each buyer only their own plot

Buyers like seeing progress, and a view of the snags marked for them can answer half their phone calls. The risk is the other half: one buyer seeing a neighbour's plot, or your internal notes. Glide Classic has two tools that work on the server and one that does not. Visibility conditions only change what the screen shows, and Glide's documentation says plainly that the app can still download hidden data in the background, so a rule that hides a row or column from a client is not security. Row Owners decide which rows a signed-in person's device downloads, based on the email they sign in with, and Glide says the feature is free on all apps. Protected columns keep unused columns out of the app altogether, but need a paid plan and a data source such as Google Sheets. The Row Owners documentation explains the mechanism.

1. Users tab. Columns for Email, Name, Role (Staff or Client) and Is manager (yes or no). Set the Role column in the app's user profile settings. The Is manager column only controls the close button, which is a convenience, not a protection.
2. Snags tab. Add a column called Access holding the word Staff in every row, and make it a row owner by role. Staff devices download the snag rows. A client's device downloads none of them.
3. Plots tab. Plot and Buyer email, one row per house.
4. ClientView tab. A formula copies only the columns a buyer may see, for rows marked Yes in Client can see, and adds the buyer's email from the Plots tab. Make that email column a row owner.

ClientView!A1:
=QUERY(Snags!A1:N, "select A, C, D, E, H, I, K, L where M = 'Yes'", 1)

ClientView!I1:  Client email
ClientView!I2:
=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(B2:B="","",IFERROR(VLOOKUP(B2:B,Plots!A:B,2,FALSE),"")))

Those formulas are the kind of thing to ask an assistant for and then test, not trust. Create two dummy buyers on personal email addresses, put each on a different plot, and sign in on two phones. Each should see only their own plot's rows, the staff screens should show nothing, and an internal note typed on the Snags tab should appear nowhere in the client app. In Glide's Data Editor, rows greyed out for a given user are not downloaded to that person's device in the published app, which gives you a second way to confirm it.

A tempting mistake is to build the client screens from the Snags tab and hide the Internal notes column with a visibility rule. The screen looks right, but the notes are still in the data the buyer's phone downloaded. A separate ClientView tab avoids that, because the notes are never copied into it. Buyers who sign in with personal email addresses count as personal users, which the Maker plan allows without limit.

Let Glide AI sort and tidy the entries

Glide Classic's AI features are available on paid plans. Text to Choice sorts a piece of text into options you list, Audio to Text transcribes a recording of up to 25 MB, and Image to Text can describe a photo or read text from it. Each feature states how many updates it uses when you add it, so check that figure before putting one on a column that runs for every row.

The most useful one for a snag list is Text to Choice on the Trade column. Give it the choices Bricklayer, Carpenter, Decorator, Electrician, Groundworker, Plasterer, Plumber and Other, point it at What is wrong, and write instructions such as: "Pick the one trade most likely to fix this snag. If unsure, choose Other." Here is how five entries might come back (illustrative).

Three of five are right, and the two wrong ones are the expensive ones. So let the AI suggest the trade and make a manager confirm it before a snag moves to Assigned, and never let it set Priority. Audio to Text suits staff whose hands are full: they record a short note, the transcript fills What is wrong, and they check it before saving. Trade words get misheard, so the check is not optional. Glide says answers are not guaranteed accurate and recommends reviewing them.

What it costs: the busiest month of a 12-house handover

Glide Classic bills by plan, with usage measured in updates. Most actions use one update per changed row: a user adding, editing or deleting a row in an external source such as Google Sheets, plus the syncs when that sheet changes. Changes inside Glide's own tables do not use updates, and neither do filters or visibility conditions. Take 12 houses with about 25 snags each, so 300 snags in the month. Each snag is added once and edited three times (assigned, fixed, closed), which is 4 updates per snag and 1,200 updates. To budget cautiously, double it to 2,400, in case sheet syncs are counted on top of the edits.

The sums: Maker's 500 included updates leave 700 extra at 1,200 usage, so 700 times $0.02 is $14 and the bill is $63. At 2,400, 1,900 extra updates cost $38 and the bill is $87. Spread over 12 houses, that is about $5 to $7 a house in the heaviest month. Business costs more but removes the cap worry and lets staff sign in with company addresses, which Maker does not. Storage is not the constraint: 600 photos at about 3 MB each is under 2 GB, against 25 GB on Maker and 500 GB on Business. If you need the app for three busy months only, monthly billing is the sensible choice: three months of Maker is $180 plus overage, while Business is $747. Annual billing only pays off if the app runs all year. Every figure here is a list price from the plan pages on 1 November 2026, so recheck before you commit.

If you start in GlideOS instead

GlideOS works from a chat box. You upload the sheet or connect a Google Sheet, describe what you want, and it first produces a mock-up with sample data. You adjust it, press Build it, preview on a phone by scanning a QR code, and publish, which needs a paid plan. Basic at $25 a month includes two published apps and 100 credits. Credits are spent on the agent's work, and Glide says usage per message is not reliably predictable: its Balanced mode uses about three times the credits of Light, and Heavy about five times. Start in Light mode and watch the usage page.

Build a snag list app for a building firm finishing 12 houses.
Staff add a snag on a phone: plot, room, what is wrong, trade,
priority, and a photo taken with the camera. Show a list that staff
can filter by status and by plot. Statuses: Open, Assigned, Fixed -
check needed, Closed. A manager can close a snag. Buyers are invited
as guests to a separate read-only app that shows only the snags
marked for them. Ask me before adding any field I did not list.

Three checks come before trusting the result. GlideOS does not write back to your Google Sheet, so decide whether its table is now the master copy, and use its CSV export to keep records in your own files. Ask the agent how the buyer app restricts rows, then test with a dummy guest, because the GlideOS pages describe inviting a guest to one app but say nothing about row-level limits, and roles and permissions are listed only from Pro. And try the camera on a real phone in the preview before you pay, since the GlideOS documentation does not spell out photo limits.

Where a Glide snag app lets you down, and the test for each

• Weak signal. Glide's help centre says its apps cache data through service workers and warns that an app opened on a weak signal may cache a broken version, which then needs reloading; none of its pages promises offline working. Test in aeroplane mode in the worst corner of a real site, and agree a fallback such as a notes-app photo with the plot number in the filename.
• Photos tied to rows. Deleting a row deletes its photo, images that no screen references for 30 days are purged, and a downgrade that removes access to rows removes their images. Diarise a monthly export of the sheet and download the photos for any snag that could become a dispute.
• The update cap. By default a team cannot use more updates than its plan includes, and users see an alert when the limit is hit. Glide emails at 75, 90 and 100 per cent of the quota. Check the usage dashboard weekly in a busy month and decide in advance whether to switch on unlimited updates.
• Alerts to subcontractors. Glide deprecated its push notification feature in December 2024 because of problems with web apps in general, so do not promise alerts. Use an email or text step in a workflow, or a plain morning message from the site manager.
• Edits that break screens. Renaming a sheet column, moving a tab or pasting formulas into empty rows can break screens or push new rows down the sheet. Make changes to a copy of the sheet first and open the app afterwards.
• Leavers. A subcontractor who stops working with you still has a sign-in until you remove them. Keep the Users tab current and review it monthly.

To judge whether the build worked, run a five-point test in the first week. A new snag with a camera photo should reach a second phone in under a minute. A dummy buyer should see only their own plot. The offline result should be written down, not assumed. A monthly export should be in the diary. And update usage after week one should sit below half the plan's allowance, otherwise the month will run over. If one of those fails, fix it before more people are invited. For the written side, the snagging report template shows how to turn the sheet into a report for sign-off, and if photos matter more to you than the list, construction photo documentation apps compared covers the paid options. Teams that prefer a different sheet-backed builder can compare Airtable and AppSheet for a job tracker.

Glide snag app questions from site managers

Does a Glide snag app work without signal on site?

Not reliably. Glide apps run in the browser. Glide's help centre says they cache data through service workers, but it also warns that an app loaded on a weak signal can cache a broken version, and no Glide page promises offline working. Test yours in aeroplane mode in the worst corner of a real site, and keep a paper or notes-app fallback for basements and plant rooms.

Can subcontractors use the app without a company email address?

On Glide Classic, anyone signing in with a personal address such as Gmail counts as a personal user, and the Maker plan allows unlimited personal users. Company-domain addresses need the Business plan, which includes 30 users and then charges $5 a month for each extra user on annual billing, as listed on Glide's pricing page.

What happens to the photos if I stop paying?

Photos taken through the Image Picker are stored on Glide's servers and tied to rows. Glide's documentation says deleting a row removes its image, images that nothing references for 30 days are purged, and a downgrade that removes access to rows removes the images too. Export the sheet and download key photos before you cancel or downgrade.

Is it safe to run Glide AI on photos and notes from clients' homes?

Glide says its agreement with the AI subprocessor keeps what you enter private and stops it being used to train the model, but its documentation also says Glide AI is not SOC 2 compliant at this time and that answers can be wrong. Keep names, phone numbers and door codes out of free-text fields, and check your client contracts first.

Further reads

• AI for a Painting Business: Snag Lists and Final Walkthrough Sign-Off — Snag lists and final walkthrough sign-off in a finishing trade.
• AI in the Construction Field: Photos, Voice Notes and Punch Lists — More ways to use photos and voice notes in the field.
• Can AI Write an Architect's Snagging List From Site Photos? — Whether AI can write a snagging list from site photos.
• Construction Handover Pack Checklist: Gather the Paperwork With AI — What else goes in the handover pack besides snags.
• Tool Tracking for Contractors: Paid App or a Sheet Built With AI? — Another sheet-backed app idea for a contractor.
• No-Code AI Tools vs a Custom Build: When Templates Stop Working — When a no-code app stops being enough.
• Five AI Apps for Construction Site Work: Photos, Logs, Checks — Five apps for photos, daily logs and site checks, with the AI features each one lists, which plan carries them, and what four users would pay.
• Best AI for Builders: Pick the First Job by Hours Lost and Risk — A scoring sheet for small building firms: rank missed calls, quote follow-up, payment chasing and site notes by hours lost and risk, then start with the winner.
• How to Use Google AI Form Builder for a Builder's Site Visit Checklist — A walkthrough for a small building firm: draft a site visit checklist with Gemini in Google Forms, add sections and photo fields, and link a response sheet.
• AI for Home Construction: Where It Helps a Builder, Plot to Handover — Seven build stages from enquiry to handover, with the job AI can take and the job that stays yours at each, plus which stage to try first.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Glide pricing page and Glide Classic pricing page (checked 1 November 2026); Glide documentation on plans and pricing; Glide help centre articles on app connection issues and the Classic Apps deprecation; Glide Classic and GlideOS documentation on data sources, users, updates, image pickers, files, roles, row owners, publishing, usage and Glide AI.