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Google App Maker Shutting Down
- rowathray 7y agoCan't wait til they shut down Flutter. Flutter is weak.
- izacus 7y agoDid anyone here actually use this?
- golem14 7y agoYup, for an enterprise-internal CRM. Worked really well; flexible, and did NOT require me to do much or really any amount of FE tweaking (all the UI is composed with a GUI). Very sad to see it go. And FWIW, not planning to go with any other no-code solution; and definitely not with anything hosted by Google unless the provide a no-code migration tool ;)
- flowersjeff 7y agoPer: "We recommend that you explore (...) options": What are everyones' best (open) options: (looking for suggestions / shilling / sharing)
- popotamonga 7y agoJust hope they don't kill flutter please.
- fredgrott 7y agothey can not..its part of their depreciate java on android strategy on android ..fuchsia OS has flutter by default
- ulfw 7y agoIs “Fuchsia OS” every going to be anything?
- owenmarshall 7y agoI always assumed it existed as a “just in case”: if some component of Android looked like it was infringing on patents, they had a head start on a replacement which was implemented in house and ABI compatible with their app ecosystem. Not to mention greenfield OS development can be catnip to engineers - it probably serves as a good retention tool.
- pjmlp 7y agoYet they have adopted Kotlin, and are seating alongside JetBrains on the Kotlin foundation.
- jmull 7y agoI would really advise against investing in flutter. It's "kitchen-sink" approach is resource-intensive to maintain. E.g., there's a language to maintain and a full suite of controls (doubly hard since integration with OS UX conventions is a constantly moving target) in addition to everything else you need for a full cross-platform app development platform. Yet, where's the revenue stream to pay for it? I think it's a matter of time before Goggle pulls resources off it. It's open I believe, so it won't just stop, but it will quickly sink into disrepair without significant resources maintaining it.
- Andrex 7y agoFlutter is likely already paying for its own development through its use internally at Google to shorten development. The Stadia app was built using Flutter, for instance, and I would expect it to pick up steam internally at Google as time goes on. It's also the primary UI for their next generation OS, Fuschia, though that could be canned down the road as well.
- sebe 7y agoYeah, the google material people like Flutter, last years flutter conf Keynote was given by VP of Design Matias Duarte https://youtu.be/NfNdXgJZfFo https://youtu.be/NfNdXgJZfFo
- ReverseCold 7y agoFlutter is seriously the easiest app development framework though (and still indistinguishable from native apps, even on old hardware, unlike React). I managed to train a bunch of high school students with minimal prior programming experience (AP Computer Science Principles, which doesn't really require you to learn how to program) to make a basically production ready frontend. Flutter support is also amazing, and is easily up to par with iOS and Android except when it comes to certain platform native features (like Apple Watch supports, iOS Widgets, etc.) They really have something here, and I think they know it. Hopefully they don't pull resources anytime soon.
- 7y ago
- pjmlp 7y agoFlutter is trying to be Dart's Rails, I wouldn't put much hope into it. Plus there are the ongoing political wars with Chrome team (alongside Microsoft) pushing for PWAs, and Android reacting to continuous stream of Flutter questions by producing Jetpack Composer. It wouldn't surprise me, if there happens to exist a Jetpack Composer variant targeted at Kotlin/Native.
- ProAm 7y agoIt's been about 18 months, seems right.
- kbenson 7y agoNot that I'd ever really heard of this product before, but it seems like it's been more like 3 years? Here's an article[1] from June 2018 that mentions it had been out for a year and a half at that point. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/14/app-maker-googles-low-code-tool-for-building-business-apps-comes-out-of-beta/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/14/app-maker-googles-low-code...
- ProAm 7y agoI think it went GA about 18 months ago, but I was being facetious more than anything. I just dont use Google products beyond maps, android and search when DDG doesnt do it for me these days. Can't trust that 1) it will still be around in a year or 2) they change the core product so much its unusable 3) can depend on any level of customer support for it
- awinograd 7y agoThis is most likely due to their acquisition of AppSheet which will likely become the "replacement" https://blog.appsheet.com/appsheet-acquired-by-google-cloud https://blog.appsheet.com/appsheet-acquired-by-google-cloud
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- october_sky 7y agoUntil it's also shuttered in 18 months, sheesh.
- ovi256 7y agoWell, that would be 18 months after the VP that championed the acquisition has been promoted and moved on.
- jessaustin 7y agoI feel this falls short as an explanation of Google's ongoing service carnage. Where are all these people going?
- afandian 7y agoThe bit that matters: > Due to the specific source code used for App Maker, you can’t directly migrate your apps to another platform. We recommend that you explore these options There must be some kind of demand curve model whose independent variable is the ability to move to another service. A highly specialised PAAS might solve all your problems but be so unique that it's too risky to spend too much money on.
- derefr 7y agoYeah, that sounds right; Docker’s probably right at the optimum point there. Though I think such a demand curve would imply that highly-specialized environments can still be useful for cases where you don’t need to spend much money on them, because you only put tiny bits of functionality in there. Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, SQL stored procedures, etc.
- spankalee 7y agoHad I started App Maker with the web platform and Node of today, I would have definitely designed things to use standard web APIs, Node on the server, and common tools for things like IO and data. Apps would have mostly a set of JS modules talking to generic enough backends to be portable. Ideally there would just be an eject button that would give you either a npm-ready project, or a Docker container. Then you could run it anywhere. The problem is that App Maker was built in GWT (basically what made sense in 2009), and because we didn't have a JS server runtime, ran JS script in Rhino on Java servers. Rhino was great at the time, but didn't evolve, and offered super-powers (like custom Java host objects that can observe mutations, even on arrays) that made JS written to our environment difficult to port. Also, all of the server and data interactions were via APIs that are strange by today's standards because of the layering on Java.
- october_sky 7y ago> Due to the specific source code used for App Maker, you can’t directly migrate your apps to another platform. We recommend that you explore these options I couldn't help but recall the song, "There she goes again" [1], when I saw this. Google propose partial alternatives, but I wonder how long until those are also shuttered. Is it even worth migrating to another Google product? if you have to do the work yourself, migrate to a different (or open source) vendor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68MKLkNSMN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68MKLkNSMN4
- izacus 7y agoDid you actually use this product? What are you migrating to?
- SQueeeeeL 7y agoNo, any reasonable user would start completely removing themselves from Google (really any corporate SaaS environment that they don't completely own the source code of). This seems like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, I'm sure on a balance sheet these products are loosing money, but that basically tells any client who wants to build a service that you aren't trustworthy in the long term.
- techntoke 7y agoThat's what is funny about all these cloud services, especially Amazon. You no longer get to think about the common sense way of doing things, but instead you have to use the AWS way. You're better off investing your time into building your own agnostic solution.
- jcadam 7y agoI really hate the way AWS forces you to choose between portability and cost-efficiency.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
- szczepano 7y agoWould be nice if they make it open source.
- polskibus 7y agoNot sure if this is good or bad news to MS PowerApps (less competition? Or bad business idea?). What does the HN crowd think?
- tyingq 7y agoThe leader in the space is Quickbase. They seem to be doing well, and worth at least a billion. https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/vista-to-acquire-quick-base-in-1b-sbo https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/vista-to-acquire-quick-base...
- jtwaleson 7y agoNot according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Low-Code Application Platforms ;) Or how would you describe the space that App Maker is in? Disclosure: worked for one of the leaders in that MQ.
- tyingq 7y agoThey show Outsystems in their upper right hand quadrant. They claim 1200 customers. Quickbase claims 6000. I excluded Microsoft and Salesforce because it's hard to single out just the low-code piece.
- echelon 7y agoGoogle, by thinking so short term, has knee-capped any developer and engineering good will for their platforms. Today's version of Microsoft is who Google should be right now, but somehow we wound up in a different timeline. Could you have imagined these roles switched back in 2005? Imagine if someone comes along and takes away Google's search business? At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard. And if that happens, they've got nothing, because they've been lazy and arrogant (or at least appear that way to an outside observer). I'm long MSFT, but definitely not GOOG. It feels like the unhealthiest FAANG. Their culture is in turmoil, they rely on one product that can be duplicated, and they routinely spurn the rest of the world. Edit: this might be my most controversial HN comment to date. It's constantly bouncing between 2 and -2.
- reaperducer 7y agoGoogle, by thinking so short term, has knee-capped any developer and engineering good will for their platforms. And yet, legions of HN'ers use and recommend Chrome, GMail, Google's Cloud offerings, Google Voice, GoogleFi, etc... I wonder if the problem is that there are no good alternatives to Big G, or if it's just some kind of mental disconnect.
- echelon 7y ago> legions of HN'ers use Every single one of those has an alternative. I'm using Firefox at home and Brave on mobile. I do need to replace Gmail. My primary inbox uses my own domain, so that won't be too hard if and when I decide to switch. Moreover, if Google lost search, how is it going to survive on those other products? Not one of them is special and doesn't have a competing offering available.
- beamatronic 7y agoI want great services, like email, and I’m willing to pay for them.
- reaperducer 7y ago
- err4nt 7y agoWhenever Google launches a new product, seems like you have ~18 months to build the long-term support option its users will need to migrate to once Google shutters their service. :D
- jpm_sd 7y agoAt this point the shutdown announcements are probably sent by a cron job
- Fiveplus 7y agoWhich makes me think - are YouTube, Drive and Gmail the holy trinity of long-term google projects that will stand the test of time?
- jannes 7y agoI think you can safely add Search, Maps and Android to your list.
- Fiveplus 7y agoMaps! Yes, how can I forget this gem? Search is how we usually define Google so I thought it best to leave it automatically assumed. On a personal note, Keep is something I would love to have around for the foreseeable future since I use it a lot.
- albertzeyer 7y agoNot sure on Android. They already work on some replacements. They probably will have some mobile OS for the long-term future, but not sure if that will be Android. But there probably will be some compat layer, at least for the beginning, when/if they plan to roll out some successor/replacement.
- kreddor 7y agoAnd AdWords, obviously
- ulfw 7y ago
- beshrkayali 7y agoI'm kinda looking forward to the day I'll see "Google is shutting down Gmail" top post on HN.
- gberger 7y agoHow about "Google shuts down"?
- flixic 7y agoI think Gmail will exist for a very long time... but HN will quite certainly exist for longer.
- techntoke 7y agoSo true, yet you got downvotes. Someone is salty.
- rchaud 7y agoWhy on earth would they shut that down? For shopping-related queries for example, search only tells Google what users' are looking for. Email tells them what they actually bought.
- pmlnr 7y agoI'm utterly terrified of that day. It'll be for email what the Reader shutdown was for RSS.
- beshrkayali 7y agoi'm not waiting for it, i switched to fastmail early last year after +10 years of gmail. it went pretty smooth.
- ralex13 7y agoGoogle recently acquired Appsheet (nocode app development platform) [1]. Considering the recent boom in nocode apps, it's highly likely that Google is trying to stay ahead of the game by acqui-hiring specialists for this. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/google-acquires-appsheet-to-bring-no-code-development-to-google-cloud/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKMgjufy9YQdjmpqaedUTN7c0Q491w1ydgSd2RJbzTIwYSrKWFvYCob1qOdlVfwH15QpB7W7T25OB--ESoQV_HI4doM4Gize8htkPqfLxItZLqHwrzMohveobsNCWWuk3dlfpFa7hpcKl3IqD-5se9Mf4TXIkFcuOvejBX_GXZCI https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/google-acquires-appsheet-t...
- arkh 7y ago> nocode apps Do you mean fancier Wordpress?
- TremendousJudge 7y ago>Wordpress Do you mean saving document as a webpage in Word 97?
- Izkata 7y agoNot sure I ever heard of that being used seriously. FrontPage and Dreamweaver on the other hand...
- Twirrim 7y agoI had to suffer through it. At the academic place I worked at back in the early 2000s, the teachers used to love writing their intranet pages in Word and emitting them in HTML. Luckily we found some software that could clean up the monstrosity it emitted, and get pages down to a reasonable size (it was not unusual to shrink pages down from several megabytes of HTML and embedded CSS, down to 10s of kilobytes.)
- freehunter 7y agoYour dismissive tone makes it sound like a bad thing. Considering how wildly successful Wordpress has been and how many small businesses it has enabled, I'd say "fancier Wordpress" is a market with a lot of potential.
- pmlnr 7y ago(offtopic-ish, just need to let it out) Google is frightening. Buy startup, shut it down late enough for people not to realize that was the goal from the beginning. In the meanwhile crack down on apps like Termux:API for being able to send SMS from android with scripts. I'm on the verge of believing that Google is out to kill tinkering and the tinkering (aka hacker) mindset. I just don't see why it's any good for them.
- jpm_sd 7y agoI'm pretty sure they are just dumb, not malicious. "Let's buy this company! It could grow into a billion dollar business!" 18-36 months later: "It's not growing fast enough. Kill it."
- pmlnr 7y agoDo that a few times, I might believe it. To it this many times? Embrace, extend, extinguish...
- rahuldottech 7y agoThis. We've seen this behaviour repeated way too many times. This is more than them just being "dumb".
- mstade 7y agoWhat's that old saying, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?
- FpUser 7y agoFool me once ... I've got enough fun with Google in the early days. The only googly things I use now are something like look at the map from the browser etc. My email (app and address), document editors, code base etc do not touch/use anything even remotely aware of Google.
- srathi 7y agoThe amount of negativity for Google has gone through the roof on HN recently. Of course, there are issues with Google, but the general sentiment on HN towards Google is disproportionately negative.
- basilgohar 7y agoHow else can it be measured except by the sentiment of the people here expressing it? You can argue there's a silent majority, and I think a lot of us may not disagree, but the sentiment of the people expressing themselves should at a minimum be judged to be sincere lacking and further evidence otherwise. The uncertainty of Google's service future and also the loss of control of my own data's future drove me to purchase email services from a commercial email provider rather than continue to rely on Google's Gmail for my personal email. So, I can say I also share this sentiment, and I am actively seeking alternatives to all the other, more "stable" services such as Search, Maps, YouTube, and so on and trying to rely less-and-less on them.
- tmpz22 7y agoAs with most things in life the total emotion is a sum of multiple unrelated experiences. The primary driver is the product shutdowns, but its also a mix of Google's original reputation as "the best" or "the smartest", combined with above average salaries and compensation. It's like if that annoying know-it-all at works makes a mistake, the mistake seems extra bad.
- filoleg 7y agoI mean, seeing google making announcements on regular every few months about shutting down another product that people actually use would kinda lead to this sort of sentiment. I wouldn’t say it is unexpected at all.
- lawik 7y agoIs it disproportionate. I use Google. I like some things they do. But for anything where I'm not a paying customer I find my trust eroding and I find myself considering options that aren't as gargantuan. With that scale accountability starts going out the window and I don't feel like Google has managed that well. Not sure if that is mostly inept PR compared to some competitors or actually being worse. Microsoft has been building up some of the previously terrible level of trust they've had around here. They've gotten up to the level of polarized mix, like Apple in my estimate. I don't see s lot of people who would get in the line of fire for Google. I think that's about trust and affection. They so things that are useful but they've been hard to like for a while in my eyes.
- thefounder 7y agoNext on list: Google firebase/Firestore/cloudstore/datastore or whatever name it has nowadays.
- dragonwriter 7y agoEr, “firebase”, “firestore”, and “cloud datastore”, are all names of different, existing (somewhat overlapping) Google offerings.
- MperorM 7y agoTangentially, I've been extremely frustrated with that. From the firebase page, you can only create a 'firebase function' using node.js. If you instead go to the google cloud page, you can create a 'cloud function' using other languages such as python, which will then show up under firebase as a 'firebase function' as well. What the hell? It is extremely confusing what can and can't be done in google cloud. There is no consistency between services. Half the documentation consists of circular references that explain very little. I work with IBM cloud professionally and am shocked how confusing GCP is in comparison. I opted for GCP for my pet project because their wavenet text-to-speech is slightly better than Watson's. I am starting to regret that decision seeing how needlessly confusing GCP is.
- dy 7y agoI seriously considered App Maker to build some internal code flows but could not develop the trust needed to deploy into production. With SaaS apps that require serious onboarding and deployment it's become almost impossible to trust Google in particular on this issue. I'm hoping SMBs will start to seriously consider business continuity as a key feature of SaaS. If I wanted to differentiate as a SaaS product today, I'd consider offering putting at minimum source code into escrow upon sale/bankruptcy.
- sarora27 7y agoGenuinely curious, in your experience, have you found a particular set of SaaS apps to have required a more involved Onboarding/Deployment or is it generally a few usual suspects?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bransonf 7y agoLet this be a warning, never get locked into a platform specific solution.
- macintux 7y ago...run by Google, anyway. The world has run on platform specific solutions for generations. Usually it works.
- robin_reala 7y agoAnother one for the Google Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- harrisreynolds 7y agoWe've built a tool that can fill the gap for anyone looking at alternatives called Webase. You can check out Webase here: https://www.webase.com/ https://www.webase.com/
- robin_reala 7y agoI mean, OK, but maybe you could explain some of the ways your alternative solution compares to App Maker?
- spankalee 7y agoI started this project as my 20% when I joined Google over 10 years ago. I had somewhat accidentally been a Filemaker consultant for a while before that and saw how far non-programmers could get with a visual schema editor and GUI editor and some light scripting. They often made a mess, so I came into to fix things, but the fact that a small business owner could make a working custom inventory and invoicing tool with absolutely no training beyond the manual was incredible to me. I'm really saddened by this shut down, for the continued reputation damage that's being done, because it's my baby (and you don't often get to create an entirely new public product at Google), and because I still believe that the world needs more and better tools that allow non- and casual programmers to build software to solve their own problems.
- benatkin 7y agoIs there at least an https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ style post somewhere? :(
- Edmond 7y agoWe're cooking up a different angle to App Maker type software. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dYVret-Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dYVret-Ck Check it out if you're still into this type of stuff:)...happy to answer questions.
- spankalee 7y agoThere are plenty of takes on this space now.
- jtwaleson 7y agoCool! Can you share who you (or the PMs involved) saw as the main competition for App Maker? Disclosure: I worked at a competitor that targets Enterprises, and we were a bit anxious when App Maker came out. Never saw much results in the market though.
- mritchie712 7y ago
- epall 7y agoOof. This really hurts. So often when folks complain about Google shutdowns, I defend G with “but that was a consumer product! GCP doesn’t kill off things. It’s different.” But here we have Google Cloud (in my defense, not GCP) killing off a powerful, proprietary Enterprise product with no viable migration path. At least folks get a year to migrate off, but that’s a lot of sunk cost.
- s3r3nity 7y agoThis is an odd move, as Microsoft is doubling down on this, as part of their "no-code" push on top of Office Apps + Azure.
- ernsheong 7y agoThey recently acquired AppSheet, a no-code platform.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hello_friendos 7y agoWhy would anyone trust Google with anything when they shut down services seemingly at random.
- crazygringo 7y agoOnce again so many people are piling in with the "Google cancels everything" trope. But the official blog post states it was due to "low usage" [1] after 18 months of general availability. Obviously, as well-intentioned or well-designed as it may have been... the product was a dud with users. I mean, did anyone here ever use it? Or know someone non-technical who did? So obviously they got the product wrong, somehow. This isn't a beloved product like Reader... it looks like it was a dud. And they're trying again with the other suggested alternatives, since "no-code" still has promise. I fail to see how this is any different from a startup that doesn't gain traction and shuts down. What do HN'ers think Google should do when a product is a dud without enough users and no clear path to success can be found -- if not cancel it? At least they're still supporting it for another full year (so users can find other solutions), which is almost as long as it existed for in the first place. [1] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/01/app-maker-update.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/01/app-maker-updat...
- Jasper_ 7y agoMaybe nobody used it because they couldn't trust it to be around for a long time?
- achillesheels 7y ago18 months is nothing and indeed consistent with their short-sightedness. For instance, Saastr affirms it takes 2 years to find market fit. Real products (ie non digital) take years to organically compound in the market. The repeated product shutdowns demonstrates misaligned incentives in the org, of more or less glorified project management padding for promotion versus long-term (5+ year) product development roadmaps. This is why I am not a GOOG investor.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- agentdrtran 7y agoIt was a dud becuase Google did not advertise it, did not invest ANY resources in training people on how to use it, and did not add any significant updates to the product in its entire existence.
- cf 7y agoThis is old news but one thing I think Google misses. No one product they cancel is used by tons of people, but the amount of people fucked over by the cancellation of any one product is enough to be an ongoing reputation hit for them.
- agentdrtran 7y agoI built two app maker apps that actually saw real-world use. Extremely disappointed to see Google get bored and kill off another product they under-invested in.
- aaronharnly 7y agoI only ever kicked the tires a bit on it, but my impression was that App Maker was really complicated as a "no code" platform, but not as powerful or portable as a "code" platform.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- whatitdobooboo 7y agoThis might be good in the grand scheme of things, as google matures they might feel the need to focus heavily on a few products rather than just try many. Also initially i dont think anyone built their company on google infrastructure, so these products had a different mindset when made.
- gundmc 7y agoI actually really liked App Maker. I started a project on it in my Gsuite domain and was able to get a functioning prototype up in an afternoon starting from 0. Then I ran into the biggest limitation that became a total nonstarter - it's impossible to share an app outside of your Gsuite domain. It's a shame, I think this product was a little tender love and care away from really being something great.
- golem14 7y agoDitto. For someone who just wants to get a little DB app out, needs some amount of scripting and doesn't want to deal with counting pixels and spend eons on FE internals, CSS etc, appMaker is/was great. I wish Google were to make the codebase open source, so that users can continue to run their deployments on self-hosted deployments, but of course that's a pipedream. Oh well, at least there is 1 year of migration time left.
- variable11 7y agoGoogle can't be trusted at all ever for anything. They are the absolute worst at customer service. They are a disgrace and anybody who works for them should be deeply ashamed for working for such a vile monopolist trash pile.
- mehh 7y agoSo DataStudio, how long do we give that?
- danzapp 7y agoHi to all, sorry if someone have already proposed the same thing, but I confess I didn't read all your message. although google has announced the end of app maker due to low usage, and therefore the community will not be so large, I propose to petition (I don't know which is the most appropriate channel) to ask Google, at least to leave active existing projects for at least one more year. Do you think Google can realistically listen to the user community? I want to highlight that we are all customers since App maker must be used with Cloud SQL which is a paid service.