App Inventor, a DIY online tool kit that allows non-techies to build bite-sized apps for Android smartphones, John Naughton reports
I see that Google has launched a new online tool that may eventually make you wish you’d never been born. It’s called App Inventor, and it’s a kind of DIY kit that will allegedly enable non-techies to build applications for Android smartphones. “To use App Inventor,” says Google, “you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behaviour.”
There’s a nice video that illustrates this point. It opens with an attractive young woman and her cat, who’s walking all over her computer keyboard. So she takes puss on to her lap and sets to work. First she hooks up her cellphone to the computer. Then she goes into the App Inventor screen and finds a “button” icon and drags that into the area before covering it with an image of a cat. Finally she finds a “sound play” block and adds that before clicking on “download to phone”. She then proudly displays her new app: you click on the picture and the phone says “miaow”.
Now, don’t get me wrong. To make this as effortless as the App Inventor appears to do requires a great deal of cleverness. In fact the software underpinning the tool is wonderfully elegant and ingenious. It’s based on research originally done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and on a dialect of the Scheme programming language, which is itself a descendant of Lisp, the original artificial intelligence language. So, software-wise, the App Inventor is lovely. It’s what people will do with it that worries me.
Two years ago this month Apple launched the iTunes Apps store and in the process triggered an avalanche of small, cheap, downloadable programs designed to run on its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. As of last month, for example, there were more than 220 000 apps in the store and the total number of downloads since it opened had passed the five billion mark. Many of these apps are free, and most of the others are priced at impulse-buy levels. Google’s Android platform launched later than the iPhone, and its apps market has therefore lagged behind Apple’s, but the number of Android apps recently passed the 100 000 mark, and it’s clear that the new App Inventor tool is intended to dramatically increase the supply.
One result of this is that the market for software has been transformed into one dominated by these bite-sized applications. “There’s an app for that,” has become Apple’s advertising slogan for its iDevices, and the meme is entering our collective unconscious. A recent New Yorker cartoon showed a depressed-looking guy arriving home. “Bad news, honey,” he says. “I’ve been replaced by an app.”
Because iPhone apps are relatively easy to write (if you have the requisite programming skills and the free System Development Kit), and even easier to distribute and sell (Apple handles all that), many people saw them as a way to get rich quick. And, in the early days especially, that did indeed seem to be true. Stories abounded of developers earning $150 000 in a month (which some did — for the first month), which fed a development frenzy. But as the stampede grew it became harder to sustain sales revenues because there’s always a more interesting impulse-buy in the store. And, of course, it became difficult to get attention for your new app, no matter how clever or ingenious it happened to be.
Gresham’s law
The other thing that became obvious is that, while there are some truly wonderful apps out there, an awful lot are trivial or tacky, or both. A big seller, for example, has been iFart (yes, you guessed what it does). Another is FingerMill Revenge (90 US cents), which turns the iPhone screen into a treadmill for your fingers. There’s iMilk ($2,70), an app that enables you to “drink milk and shake whipped cream from the comfort of your trouser pocket”. Er, and there’s iPee (90c), “a simple psychological and fun tool that presents images and/or sounds of various water scenes to kickstart you into taking care of your business”. And so on.
Note that these are all iPhone apps, which means that a modicum of serious programming expertise is needed to create them. Which leads me back to my original question about the new Google apps toolkit. If daft apps are what emerge from the level of applied IQ poured into iPhone development, imagine what it will be like when any Tom, Dick or Harriet can have a go. Maybe it will be wonderful, and we will see a blossoming of app-making creativity. Or maybe we will just discover that Gresham’s law — stated as “bad money drives out good if their exchange rate is set by law” — also applies to software.
guardian.co.uk