Google today announced the launch of a new tool called App Maker that will help companies build tailored cloud-based business apps for internal use. It’s a cloud-based platform for that offers features like drag-and-drop UI editor, built-in templates, point-and-click modelling accelerate app development and populate it with the data stored on your Gsuite applications along with a powerful coding editor that allows you to further customize the apps if you are up for a fairly meaty development challenges as well as basic ones.
App Maker will be rolled out as a part of Google’s Gsuite and for is now available through Google’s Early Adopter Program for G Suite Business. It is based on functionality that Google has used to efficiently build more than 300 apps for its own use.
“For the last year or so, we’ve been polishing it and making it customer-hardened and enterprise-ready,” says Elissa Murphy., VP of engineering at Google.
Reason for that?
Google was breaking banks and marketing hard to convince enterprises to adopt Gsuite (formely Google Apps), bundle of cloud-based productivity apps like . But every organization has unique needs and workflows that Gsuite wasn’t built to address. Organizations use numerous third party apps for their day in- day out tasks like CRM, team communication, project management to get their job done. And Google decided to improvise, Google today has announced two new ways to extend (rather customize) Gsuite experience.
App Maker, a new low-code developer tool for building custom enterprise applications, and the addition of seven new partners to their “Recommended for G Suite” third-party partner program namely Virtru, LumApps, DocuSign, Freshdesk, Zoho Invoice, Xero and Asana. This program certifies that an application is well-integrated into G Suite and that it has been tested for security vulnerabilities.
In regard to this Murphy says, “We asked ourselves, what are the categories of products we’re not likely to fill, but we know customers are using?” For a company that’s already using Asana for project management or Xero for accounting, the fact that these services have partnered up with Google might be one more reason to give G Suite a try.
From ‘Idea to App’ in days!
Google’s app maker is the newest entry in the minimal code, drag and drop app building market against the well settled counterparts from Microsoft’s ‘PowerApps’ ,Salesforce and other startups. It is pointed towards the customers of Google’s Gsuite who need to customed-business apps for their organization that integrates well with data present on Gsuite such as Google maps, contacts, groups and virtually any service that offer an API.
App Maker promises to make to make it easier for businesses to iterate from a prototype to deployment in just 2 days.
No “End all or be all”
Although Google’s App Maker promises to be a one-man army for all your enterprise app solution needs but it’s more of a “Jack of all trades”. It provides businesses with the ability to build minimal viable apps tailored to their business needs and workflow but misses out on the providing the ability for more advanced projects. Even for serious coders who are up for meaty development challenges , App Maker only provides the code editor to take advantage of SQL databases, scripting, and standards such as JQuery, and can integrate the app maker with Google Analytics.
Here’s the Long and Short of it:
Need an app to help your team collaborate on a particular project? Use a low-code app builder to create the basic app framework in minutes. Well what about customizing it afterwards with coding?
For more advanced projects, you can always hire a professional app development team with good expertise in Enterprise App Development such as ours.
That said, App Maker is a total game changer but is still in its infancy. However App Maker is one pillar of Google’s strategy to build out a greater app ecosystem and business workflows around G Suite.