It's good to see DigitalOcean picking up some pace in improving products. The App platform was a decent product when they first announced it but then they just stopped improving it and it has falling way behind other providers.

They need to rebuild the app platform using Firecracker VMs. The build time on App Platform tends to be a lot longer and the performance is worst that most other platforms built on top of Firecracker like Fly, Koyeb, and AWS Fargate.

They also need a better CLI tool for deploying. They should fork/copy FlyCtl rename it Ship and make it work with App Spec and add in the DigitalOcean features.

They also need to make it easier to integrate with their other products like Spaces, and Managed Databases.

If they make these changes, App Platform would probably be the best place to host an application for any startup/dev.

I still use DO for Database and Spaces because they offer the best price for performance but hosting apps I have to go else where because the performance, ease of use, and developer experience isn't as good as Fly, or Koyeb.

Hopefully someone at DO looks at this and write these down. I bet if they ask a lot of their customers they would agree these are good changes.