Honestly, if you’ve been keeping an eye on the low-code world lately, it feels like everything is moving at warp speed. Blink and you’ll miss a major update. October 2025 has been a particularly weird and busy month for the Google AppSheet community. We’ve seen everything from high-stakes outages to "finally" moments for AI features that have been in preview for what feels like an eternity.
A lot of the noise online is just people rehashing old release notes, but if you're actually building apps for a living, the reality on the ground is different. You've probably noticed that the platform is fundamentally changing how it handles data and intelligence. It's not just a spreadsheet-to-app tool anymore.
What Really Happened With AppSheet News October 2025
The biggest headline for October 2025 wasn't even a feature launch—it was a massive service disruption on October 9th. It was a rough day for developers in the EMEA and AMER regions. For nearly three hours, apps just... stopped. Syncing failed, the editor wouldn't load, and the community forums were on fire. Google eventually tracked it down to a Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) failure in their Kubernetes setup. Basically, the servers couldn't handle the load because the "auto-scale" button got accidentally deleted during an infrastructure move.
It's a reminder that even the biggest players have "oops" moments. But once the dust settled, the focus shifted back to the AppSheet news October 2025 updates that actually matter for your workflow.
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Gemini Finally Goes GA: The AI Shift
The "Gemini in AppSheet Solutions" suite finally hit General Availability (GA) this month for Enterprise Plus users. If you’ve been stuck in the preview program, you know the drill. Now, features like Extract Rows and Summarize are officially ready for prime time.
Why should you care?
Because the "Extract Rows" feature is a game changer for anyone dealing with invoices. Instead of just grabbing a single total from a PDF, the AI can now parse line items and dump them into separate rows in your database. It handles files up to 12 MB now, too. We’re seeing a lot of finance teams using this to automate receipts without writing a single line of regex.
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What's New in the AI Toolkit:
- Summarize: You can now generate a summary of a record based on specific attributes. Think: summarizing a long customer history into a three-sentence brief for a sales rep.
- Rate Limits: They actually listened to the complaints. AI tasks were upgraded to allow 30 requests per minute, up from the previous cap of 10.
- Airtable & Workday: Integration connectors for Airtable and Workday moved into preview, which is huge for those of us trying to bridge the gap between HR and operations.
The AppSheet Database Row Limit Debate
There was a lot of chatter this month about AppSheet Database (ASDB). People are starting to hit the limits of the Core plan, which caps out at 2,500 rows per database. If you’re on the Enterprise Plus plan, you’re sitting pretty with 200,000 rows, but that middle ground is getting crowded.
I saw a thread on the developer forums where users were debating whether the performance gains of ASDB are worth the row constraints compared to a standard Google Sheet. The consensus? If you have more than 20,000 rows in a single table, ASDB smokes Google Sheets in terms of sync speed. It’s not even close. But for smaller, scrappy apps, the 2,500-row limit on the Core plan feels a bit stingy.
The "Invisible" Updates: Android 9 and Bug Fixes
Google also quietly announced they’re dropping support for Android 9 starting with version 17.6 of the AppSheet app. If your field team is still carrying around ancient tablets from 2018, you’ve got about two years of "legacy support" left before they’re bricks.
It’s also worth noting the October 21st release notes. While some users (like Koichi_Tsuji on the forums) expressed disappointment at the lack of "meaningful content," the stabilization of the integration connectors for Airtable is actually a big win for enterprise interoperability. It's the "boring" stuff that keeps the big companies paying the bills.
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Surprising Nuance: Why Your AI Task Might Fail
A lot of creators are getting frustrated because their AI tasks aren't recognizing specific niche objects—like a very specific mechanical part in a factory. Here’s the thing: Gemini is smart, but it's not a mind reader.
The most successful developers this month are the ones providing additional instructions within the AI Task configuration. You don't need to tell it how to format the output (AppSheet handles the JSON mess for you), but you do need to give it context. For example, instead of just saying "Extract data," try "Extract the serial number located next to the QR code on the silver nameplate."
Actionable Insights for App Builders
If you’re managing an AppSheet environment right now, here is what you should actually do based on this month's news:
- Check Your OS: Audit your mobile fleet. If you have devices on Android 9, start budgeting for an upgrade now.
- Verify Governance: If you're on Enterprise Plus, make sure your Admins haven't accidentally disabled the new Gemini features via policy. I've seen several cases where "Extract Rows" was missing simply because a global security policy was too restrictive.
- Test the Limits: If you're hitting performance lag on Google Sheets, try migrating one table to AppSheet Database. The October updates proved that ASDB is the future for high-performance apps, even if the row limits for lower tiers are still a bit of a headache.
- Monitor Your Audit Logs: With the increase to 30 requests per minute for AI tasks, keep an eye on your automation monitoring. If you’re looping AI tasks, you can still hit those caps faster than you think.
The transition from a simple no-code tool to an AI-augmented enterprise platform is officially here. It's messy, the outages are annoying, but the power you have at your fingertips in late 2025 is lightyears ahead of where we were even a year ago. Stop treating it like a spreadsheet and start treating it like a database.