About 18 months ago, Google introduced us to App Maker, a tool that as its name suggests, allows you to build and deploy apps (specifically of the business variety) on the web. Over the last year and a half, Google hasn’t made much of a hubbub around the tool and it has remained in private preview mode. But that all changed on June 14 when Google announced that App Maker had been made generally available to all developers who want to take this tool for a test drive.
“Today, we’re making App Maker generally available to help you rethink how your teams operate,” Google noted in a blog post. “App Maker is G Suite’s low-code application development environment that makes it easy for teams to build custom apps to speed up workflows and make processes better.”
In order to access App Maker, you need a G Suite Business or Enterprise subscription, or a G Suite for Education edition. But once you’ve that, you don’t need much else. The beauty of App Maker is that it doesn’t require its users to have much — or any — coding experience. Rather, they can rely upon data that already exists in G Suite, Google’s Cloud SQL database, or other databases that supports JDBC or feature a REST API.
In essence, App Maker offers a low-code app development environment that allows users to create new apps using a drag-and-drop interface. Once the database is set up, all you need to do is select a template and begin designing an app to improve your workflow. Best of all, it would appear that design is responsive, which is to say that the finished apps should work on both desktop and mobile.
App Maker allows access to a total of 40 Google Services and focuses mostly on Google products (rather than offering built-in integrations with third-party offerings like Salesforce). However, now that App Maker is being made widely available, this could change in order to make the tool more broadly useful.
“App Maker was created to enable your line-of-business teams to build apps for the jobs these bigger apps don’t tackle,” Google noted. “With App Maker, you can revamp company processes like requesting purchase orders or filing and resolving help desk tickets, as if you designed and built the processes yourself.”
You can learn how to get started with documentation and this codelab.
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