Ever since Google App Inventor for Android was developed and launched on the market in 2010, it has opened up a whole new can of worms regarding the do-or-die question of whether we actually need application designers and professional programmers.
The answer will be undoubtedly that app –inventor software will most certainly allow anyone that doesn’t have any knowledge of programming to get an application up and running using WYSIWYG, just dragging and dropping what you need.
When it was launched on the market the roll-out seemed as if it would bring the design industry in applications to its knees. But, it simply hasn’t happened. Why not?
There’s one simply reason. Bringing technology in this way to the masses means inevitably and undoubtedly that you will end up with a plethora of worse than mediocre app-building templates that will be of little value to anyone.
How can it be possible to think for one second that an end-user with no knowledge is going to be able to set up the security and protection on the application that the customer is looking for?
• According to the report by the Pew Research Center on ‘Anonymity, Privacy and Security Online’ 86% of internet users have already done something to make sure that there digital footprints are erased (removal of cookies or masking their IP address).
• 68% of people believe that security laws do not protect them enough on the internet today.
• Democratization is a good thing, but there are times when things should be left to the professionals.
• If you’re purely looking for functionality and efficiency doesn’t matter, then EUP apps are the thing. Simple, functional (although not secure and certainly not verifiable), but they’re not efficient.
It’s not like this that the next great app is going to be created and it can only reduce the number of possibilities. There’s already a problem with getting an app seen in the world and this is just making that pile of garbage accumulate today in the app stores.
Programming for non-programmers is just an oxymoron that will get the masses believing that any old Tom, Dick or Harry can set up an app in next-to-no-time and launch it on the market. But, it’s simply not going to happen. The world is still going to need designers that can tailor-make the apps that companies and industries need to get themselves noticed and to make them stand out from the crowd. Turning the app world into a banal, identical-looking land of similarity will have no benefit to the companies that use them and certainly will do nothing more than make the consumer or user run in the other direction.
If it looks like everyone else’s, then why would you want to use it?
Anything that is computer-generated will save you time and money. But, it won’t get anything more than standardization of the market. Standardization means death and consumers don’t want it. It was a novelty only in the beginning.
And what about cross platforms?
There is good platforms like PhoneGap, Titanium or Xamarin that exist and have the gift of ubiquity (Ouch!). We develop apps in web language and content is suitable for all mobile platforms.
A lot of time and money saved !
Would be great uh? A lot of time and money saved !
It is clear that:
– Contrary to the app inventor, their use requires strong technical skills in web.
– Try to encapsulate the web to make the native is often more time-consuming than native code directly.
– Navigation in a terminal Android and iPhone in a terminal simply has nothing to do.
– The native coding adds the proximity towards the lower layers of the OS and therefore promotes the fluidity of navigation.
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote: “We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. » Love it !
