10 ms·

Google App Maker

179 points by djangowithme 10y ago

andy_ppp 10y ago
That everything will be replaced by machines including you? ;-)
brohoolio 10y ago
I requested access a few months ago... still don't have it. We are looking at a number of these rapid development tools. Hopefully google opens it up soon before we select a different one. I'd be curious if this platform has sticking power. Google rolls these sorts of offerings out from time to time and then shuts them down. If I knew there was a couple years of runway for this offering my fears would go away.
- nthcolumn 10y ago
  I must need this since I can't even get the sign-up form to work. So do you know any others?
  - GarethX 10y ago
    Here's a few: https://www.outsystems.com/ https://www.outsystems.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.appian.com/ http://www.appian.com/
  - kuschku 10y ago
    I just disabled JS and CSS to get the form, and changed the select’s option to value="de">Germany<, and then simply submitted it like that. I have no idea if it worked, but at least that way it does something. Per default, the form just doesn’t do anything for me.
  - mmerlin 10y ago
    http://www.alphaanywhere.com http://www.alphaanywhere.com
  - atecarlos 10y ago
    I would highly recommend checking out https://www.dropsource.com/ https://www.dropsource.com/
- Roritharr 10y ago
  What are the alternatives you are looking at?
- 2_listerine_pls 10y ago
  Make sure you have a G-suite Business account and your domain address is whitelisted within settings.
- mbesto 10y ago
  I'm about to dig into MS Powerapps. Comes with O365. https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/
jitl 10y ago
@dang, this title seems to be editorializing.
- vnchr 10y ago
  I thought it was framing a particular discussion, like an "Ask HN" post. Editorializing would mean asserting some sort of opinion--seems factual that this new tool has relevance to web developers.
  - joatmon-snoo 10y ago
    I think it's more of the clickbait nature of the title.
- dang 10y ago
  Right. Changed from "What does Google's new tool “App Maker” mean for web developers?".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jwilliams 10y ago
Very interesting! This concept has been around for a long, long time in many guises - arguably recent examples are Zoho, Microsoft PowerApps, Salesforce perhaps... And many more going back to Access, Lotus Notes and dbase. The question is really one of execution (and remaining modern). Too generic and it lacks a killer app. Too specific and it hides of a niche.
- mythrwy 10y ago
  I've not seen one of these type of applications yet that allowed the flexibility needed to handle many (perhaps the majority?) of use cases gracefully. What I have seen is non-programmers getting enough power to get overconfident only to wind up with a mess. These type of applications make it super easy to do 85% of the work. Unfortunately the remaining 15% often turns out to be impossible. Additionally when requirements change (and when don't they?) there often isn't the flexibility needed to make the changes. The last thing I've observed is when something goes wrong if the person can't drill down into the internals and make adjustments they are just plain out of luck. I've seen this with both Access and Lotus Notes. Companies struggle with bugs for years. I've had a fair share of work re-writing these type of applications into web applications which finally do what is really needed without issue and can be changed when required. In short I'm not concerned. Seen it before. Works for very simple apps, blows up spectacularly when something non-standard is needed. And this makes work for me. Maybe this time it will be different but I really don't think so.
  - ruleabidinguser 10y ago
    I get the feeling that some day theyll get it right and 90% of programming jobs will dissapear.
ja9urc311 10y ago
Google SharePoint?
sopooneo 10y ago
I've often wondered, if you could create a gui app maker like this where the app itself could be exported as, say, a Rails codebase at any time. That would help reassure organizations that wanted to use the service but were worried about lockin or the service shutting down.
headcanon 10y ago
It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable. I once worked with a guy who embodied the "grumpy old man" (we were both just out of college btw) attitude for every new, cool thing I brought to his attention. I kept telling him that in order to stay relevant as a programmer in the foreseeable future he would have to stay on top of technology and keep his chops up outside of the very mundane engineering work that we did at that company. He would flatly refuse out of hand and say things like "Someone who only knows COBOL for 40 years will still have a job". It frustrated the hell out of me at the time, but he's probably right. Not saying you're guaranteed a great job or be making google-level salaries, but you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology. There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. If you have even enough interest to be on this website and explore things like App Maker and question things like this, you're going to be just fine :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  Thank you. I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that. Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch. > There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.
zenonu 10y ago
From simplest to manage to most freedom: App Maker < App Engine < Container Engine < Compute Engine (VMs) So pick your poison for the business problem at hand. Don't host your blog on a dedicated VM. Don't use App Maker for training neural networks.
- markdown 10y ago
  I'd break App Engine into standard and flexible environments.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
It means that there will be two new jobs related to this project. 1. App Maker developer wanted to create App Maker Apps . 2. Web developer needed to transition our App Maker App to a javascript / python / ruby standalone project.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  Note my comment was in response to the original title : google released this what does this mean ? (paraphrasing here don't remember the exact wording).
  - djangowithme 10y ago
    What does Google's "App Maker" mean for web developers?
- jmknoll 10y ago
  Very well put. Tools like this, by lowering the barrier to entry of making software (I'm assuming the best case scenario - that App Maker is a quality product), tools like this expand the pie and make the software development industry larger. Wordpress is the perfect analogy here. And a lot of my best freelance jobs recently have been for companies not traditionally in the tech industry who had a new idea they wanted to pursue, proofed the concept with a Wordpress site, and then once they had some degree of market validation, needed a developer to build it into something more robust and customizable.
bitL 10y ago
Alright, so what's missing before web developers aren't needed anymore: - speech recognition so that you tell what you want - LEGO blocks for simple things that can be composed and adjusted by voice or AR gestures - large amount of working code so that "glue" between blocks can be inferred using ML/DL I am pretty sure App Maker 2.0 will have at least 1 of these finished.
cutler 10y ago
All hail the new Wordpress of app development.
mxuribe 10y ago
And I've been thinking about moving my email to fastmail...And then Google tries to tempt me with this! Dang it, they know how to lure me back! :-(
jlank 10y ago
If anyone here has requested access to App Maker and not received it yet please PM me. SADA Systems (my company) is partnered with google and have been in the early access program for App Maker kicking the tires. We offer app maker development and consulting services for companies looking to deepen their investment in g suite and build cool apps on top of it!
- yorwba 10y ago
  You may want to put an email address in the about field of your HN profile, otherwise you won't be getting any PMs.
  - jlank 10y ago
    Good call, thank you!
SnowingXIV 10y ago
Are there limitations on data or records? I have a SQL database that I'd be interested in migrating over to a solution like this if it can handle 1M+ records without worry.
- 7ewis 10y ago
  I believe there is a limit, but you can upgrade to use Cloud SQL.
tyingq 10y ago
I've tried a lot of these tools. The trouble is that things go extremely well until you hit a wall. With no way to extend them with something like freeform code, the wall doesn't move. The best ones, then, tend to be the ones that have been around long enough, or had enough foresight to have covered various corner cases. The other issue is that most of them have "per user / per month" pricing, which doesn't work for many use cases. Things like, for example, an applicant tracking app. If you use the functionality to a high degree, every job applicant is another end user license. Two of the better ones: http://quickbase.com http://quickbase.com & http://ragic.com http://ragic.com Other ones I've seen: http://caspio.com http://caspio.com, http://knack.com http://knack.com, http://fusio.com http://fusio.com, http://trackvia.com/ http://trackvia.com/, http://podio.com http://podio.com, https://www.zoho.com/creator/ https://www.zoho.com/creator/, http://airtable.com http://airtable.com, https://getzenbase.com/ https://getzenbase.com/, http://www.zenginehq.com/ http://www.zenginehq.com/ One of the more promising ones was DabbleDB. Twitter acquihired them and shut the tool down. It had a very smooth UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY
- sitepodmatt 10y ago
  It is possible extensibility will be via Google Apps Script, about as close to "freeform" code one can get in a sandbox. Google have successfully implemented Apps Script in a number of G Suite products so I would be optimistic about seeing it in App Maker for advanced scenarios. Fingers crossed
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Many of the tools I mentioned have scripting capabilities, but that doesn't keep you from hitting a wall, because you're scripting in whatever limited context they give you. Sometimes the wall is the data model, or the construct they give you for navigation, access control, roles, etc. Something like freeform javascript that executes in the client would help a lot, because you could patch around limitations in many cases.
    - spankalee 10y ago
ge96 10y ago
Not sure if related but right now I'd trade knowledge for business insight, I can build things but I have no idea what to make that makes money. Right now I just build stuff for people. It's funny 3-4 years ago when I first started to learn web dev, I had a lot of ideas that I thought would be "viral/make money" but now I have hardly any... a lot of my ideas back then were pretty dumb too looking back at it.
locusm 10y ago
If there is one line of apps that has consistently failed over the last 20 years it is these.

179 points by djangowithme 10y ago

That everything will be replaced by machines including you? ;-)

I requested access a few months ago... still don't have it. We are looking at a number of these rapid development tools. Hopefully google opens it up soon before we select a different one. I'd be curious if this platform has sticking power. Google rolls these sorts of offerings out from time to time and then shuts them down. If I knew there was a couple years of runway for this offering my fears would go away.

nthcolumn 10y ago
I must need this since I can't even get the sign-up form to work. So do you know any others?
- GarethX 10y ago
  Here's a few: https://www.outsystems.com/ https://www.outsystems.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.appian.com/ http://www.appian.com/
- kuschku 10y ago
  I just disabled JS and CSS to get the form, and changed the select’s option to value="de">Germany<, and then simply submitted it like that. I have no idea if it worked, but at least that way it does something. Per default, the form just doesn’t do anything for me.
- mmerlin 10y ago
  http://www.alphaanywhere.com http://www.alphaanywhere.com
- atecarlos 10y ago
  I would highly recommend checking out https://www.dropsource.com/ https://www.dropsource.com/
Roritharr 10y ago
What are the alternatives you are looking at?
2_listerine_pls 10y ago
Make sure you have a G-suite Business account and your domain address is whitelisted within settings.
mbesto 10y ago
I'm about to dig into MS Powerapps. Comes with O365. https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

jitl 10y ago

@dang, this title seems to be editorializing.

vnchr 10y ago
I thought it was framing a particular discussion, like an "Ask HN" post. Editorializing would mean asserting some sort of opinion--seems factual that this new tool has relevance to web developers.
- joatmon-snoo 10y ago
  I think it's more of the clickbait nature of the title.
dang 10y ago
Right. Changed from "What does Google's new tool “App Maker” mean for web developers?".
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jwilliams 10y ago

Very interesting! This concept has been around for a long, long time in many guises - arguably recent examples are Zoho, Microsoft PowerApps, Salesforce perhaps... And many more going back to Access, Lotus Notes and dbase. The question is really one of execution (and remaining modern). Too generic and it lacks a killer app. Too specific and it hides of a niche.

mythrwy 10y ago
I've not seen one of these type of applications yet that allowed the flexibility needed to handle many (perhaps the majority?) of use cases gracefully. What I have seen is non-programmers getting enough power to get overconfident only to wind up with a mess. These type of applications make it super easy to do 85% of the work. Unfortunately the remaining 15% often turns out to be impossible. Additionally when requirements change (and when don't they?) there often isn't the flexibility needed to make the changes. The last thing I've observed is when something goes wrong if the person can't drill down into the internals and make adjustments they are just plain out of luck. I've seen this with both Access and Lotus Notes. Companies struggle with bugs for years. I've had a fair share of work re-writing these type of applications into web applications which finally do what is really needed without issue and can be changed when required. In short I'm not concerned. Seen it before. Works for very simple apps, blows up spectacularly when something non-standard is needed. And this makes work for me. Maybe this time it will be different but I really don't think so.
- ruleabidinguser 10y ago
  I get the feeling that some day theyll get it right and 90% of programming jobs will dissapear.

ja9urc311 10y ago

Google SharePoint?

sopooneo 10y ago

I've often wondered, if you could create a gui app maker like this where the app itself could be exported as, say, a Rails codebase at any time. That would help reassure organizations that wanted to use the service but were worried about lockin or the service shutting down.

headcanon 10y ago

It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable. I once worked with a guy who embodied the "grumpy old man" (we were both just out of college btw) attitude for every new, cool thing I brought to his attention. I kept telling him that in order to stay relevant as a programmer in the foreseeable future he would have to stay on top of technology and keep his chops up outside of the very mundane engineering work that we did at that company. He would flatly refuse out of hand and say things like "Someone who only knows COBOL for 40 years will still have a job". It frustrated the hell out of me at the time, but he's probably right. Not saying you're guaranteed a great job or be making google-level salaries, but you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology. There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. If you have even enough interest to be on this website and explore things like App Maker and question things like this, you're going to be just fine :)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
themodelplumber 10y ago
Thank you. I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that. Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch. > There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.

zenonu 10y ago

From simplest to manage to most freedom: App Maker < App Engine < Container Engine < Compute Engine (VMs) So pick your poison for the business problem at hand. Don't host your blog on a dedicated VM. Don't use App Maker for training neural networks.

markdown 10y ago
I'd break App Engine into standard and flexible environments.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

It means that there will be two new jobs related to this project. 1. App Maker developer wanted to create App Maker Apps . 2. Web developer needed to transition our App Maker App to a javascript / python / ruby standalone project.

zitterbewegung 10y ago
Note my comment was in response to the original title : google released this what does this mean ? (paraphrasing here don't remember the exact wording).
- djangowithme 10y ago
  What does Google's "App Maker" mean for web developers?
jmknoll 10y ago
Very well put. Tools like this, by lowering the barrier to entry of making software (I'm assuming the best case scenario - that App Maker is a quality product), tools like this expand the pie and make the software development industry larger. Wordpress is the perfect analogy here. And a lot of my best freelance jobs recently have been for companies not traditionally in the tech industry who had a new idea they wanted to pursue, proofed the concept with a Wordpress site, and then once they had some degree of market validation, needed a developer to build it into something more robust and customizable.

bitL 10y ago

Alright, so what's missing before web developers aren't needed anymore: - speech recognition so that you tell what you want - LEGO blocks for simple things that can be composed and adjusted by voice or AR gestures - large amount of working code so that "glue" between blocks can be inferred using ML/DL I am pretty sure App Maker 2.0 will have at least 1 of these finished.

cutler 10y ago

All hail the new Wordpress of app development.

mxuribe 10y ago

And I've been thinking about moving my email to fastmail...And then Google tries to tempt me with this! Dang it, they know how to lure me back! :-(

jlank 10y ago

If anyone here has requested access to App Maker and not received it yet please PM me. SADA Systems (my company) is partnered with google and have been in the early access program for App Maker kicking the tires. We offer app maker development and consulting services for companies looking to deepen their investment in g suite and build cool apps on top of it!

yorwba 10y ago
You may want to put an email address in the about field of your HN profile, otherwise you won't be getting any PMs.
- jlank 10y ago
  Good call, thank you!

SnowingXIV 10y ago

Are there limitations on data or records? I have a SQL database that I'd be interested in migrating over to a solution like this if it can handle 1M+ records without worry.

7ewis 10y ago
I believe there is a limit, but you can upgrade to use Cloud SQL.

tyingq 10y ago

I've tried a lot of these tools. The trouble is that things go extremely well until you hit a wall. With no way to extend them with something like freeform code, the wall doesn't move. The best ones, then, tend to be the ones that have been around long enough, or had enough foresight to have covered various corner cases. The other issue is that most of them have "per user / per month" pricing, which doesn't work for many use cases. Things like, for example, an applicant tracking app. If you use the functionality to a high degree, every job applicant is another end user license. Two of the better ones: http://quickbase.com http://quickbase.com & http://ragic.com http://ragic.com Other ones I've seen: http://caspio.com http://caspio.com, http://knack.com http://knack.com, http://fusio.com http://fusio.com, http://trackvia.com/ http://trackvia.com/, http://podio.com http://podio.com, https://www.zoho.com/creator/ https://www.zoho.com/creator/, http://airtable.com http://airtable.com, https://getzenbase.com/ https://getzenbase.com/, http://www.zenginehq.com/ http://www.zenginehq.com/ One of the more promising ones was DabbleDB. Twitter acquihired them and shut the tool down. It had a very smooth UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY

sitepodmatt 10y ago
It is possible extensibility will be via Google Apps Script, about as close to "freeform" code one can get in a sandbox. Google have successfully implemented Apps Script in a number of G Suite products so I would be optimistic about seeing it in App Maker for advanced scenarios. Fingers crossed
- tyingq 10y ago
  Many of the tools I mentioned have scripting capabilities, but that doesn't keep you from hitting a wall, because you're scripting in whatever limited context they give you. Sometimes the wall is the data model, or the construct they give you for navigation, access control, roles, etc. Something like freeform javascript that executes in the client would help a lot, because you could patch around limitations in many cases.
  - spankalee 10y ago

ge96 10y ago

Not sure if related but right now I'd trade knowledge for business insight, I can build things but I have no idea what to make that makes money. Right now I just build stuff for people. It's funny 3-4 years ago when I first started to learn web dev, I had a lot of ideas that I thought would be "viral/make money" but now I have hardly any... a lot of my ideas back then were pretty dumb too looking back at it.

locusm 10y ago

If there is one line of apps that has consistently failed over the last 20 years it is these.