> Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac.

On the Mac, it's FileMaker,[1] which was released in 1985. Claris is a subsidiary of Apple.

[1]: https://www.claris.com/blog/2026/claris-filemaker-2026-is-no...

I'm shocked in general at the lack of open source Rapid Application Development software.

There is openoffice base https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sdatabase/mai...

I am not going to claim it is any good, it suffers from the same problem most rapid application toolkits have, the easy stuff is easier, the hard stuff is harder. I was playing around at one point to see if it was worth using as a graphical interface to a postgres database. And... it worked. But in the end I preferred writing web applications. As much as I hate web dev it was better than the RAD jank.

In the mid-2000's, I built a lot of applications replacing Access. I always met with the actual users of the system, and made sure they understood that once I took over development, they weren't going to be able to build out their own forms anymore. A few clients were turned away, but most could live with paying for myself to make any future edits, so that they could concentrate on the business objective rather than coding in Access. I never really had the same success with replacing Excel, except for a few systems where it needed to be true multi-user.

There's Gambas: https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Lazarus/FreePascal: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Kivy: https://kivy.org/

Grails: https://grails.apache.org/

And any number of combinations using the web. I think they've just fallen off in popularity due to all the web interfaces, honestly.

> Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac.

Here you go: https://visualdb.com There are many modern alternatives, in fact.

Spec one.

Start one.

Has someone written on or otherwise worked on this?

Technically, MS Power Apps is the successor to MS Access. Power Apps is a web application so that solves the cross platform problem.

Having played with it, it’s not as turn key as either MS Access or something like Airtable. It can be overly complicated and it’s infected with the paradox of choice.

Sqlite?