Google App Maker

» see appmaker.withgoogle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Google App Maker arrived on 30 November 2016 as an answer to a question every medium-sized company keeps asking, which is who is going to build the small ugly internal tool nobody wants to own. The holiday rota. The purchase approval form. The spreadsheet of who has which laptop, which has been a spreadsheet for nine years and should not be. App Maker let somebody in IT drag widgets onto a canvas, bind them to a data source, and have a working web app on the company domain by the end of the afternoon.

It was not a toy underneath. The drag-and-drop layer sat on top of a real stack, and you could drop into raw HTML and JavaScript when the widgets ran out, with jQuery available and Material Design as the default skin. Apps talked to Google's own services and to external databases over JDBC. Someone competent could get a long way with it, which put it in the awkward middle: too technical for the office manager, too constrained for the developer who would rather write the thing properly.

Note the name, because there is a grave two doors down for Mozilla Appmaker, a completely separate product from a completely different organization that also let people build apps without code and also died. Nobody involved seems to have noticed the collision. Google's version had the tighter constraint anyway, because App Maker required one of the upper G Suite tiers, Business or Enterprise, with the Education edition also carrying it. If your company was on the cheap plan or you were a person with an ordinary Gmail address, the product did not exist for you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ behind the tier wall ~

That licensing decision shaped everything that happened afterward. A tool for building internal apps only reaches the people who already have administrative access to a paid workspace, which is a small population of IT staff rather than a market. There was no hobbyist layer, no student layer, no weekend. Compare that with what App Maker was competing against by 2019, since Airtable and Notion were growing by letting one curious person on a team start for free and infect the rest of the company from the inside.

App Maker could not be adopted that way by design. It had to be turned on from above, by an administrator, for a domain. Google spent four years on a product whose distribution model guaranteed it would never develop the user affection that keeps a Google product alive during a reorganization.

~ the two weeks in january ~

On 14 January 2020 Google announced it had acquired AppSheet, a no-code platform founded in 2014 that did roughly the same job and did it for a broader audience. On 27 January, thirteen days later, the App Maker deprecation notice went up. The reasoning given was low usage, which was true, and the timing told you the rest.

The wind-down ran a full year, which is more courtesy than Google usually extends. New app creation was switched off on 15 April 2020. Existing apps kept running through the rest of the year while admins were pointed at AppSheet or at rebuilding on Apps Script, and the service finally stopped on 19 January 2021. For once the data had somewhere to go, since the underlying Cloud SQL databases were not part of the shutdown and anything in them survived the product that had been reading them.

~ the recurring dream ~

The idea App Maker was chasing has been attempted roughly once per decade since the 1990s and the attempts keep landing in the same place. Microsoft shipped Popfly in 2007 and killed it two years later, around the same time Coghead sold its assets to SAP and switched off with customer apps still running on it. Google Fusion Tables, which let non-programmers build data-backed pages, held on until 2019.

Every one of them was built on the belief that the bottleneck in software is typing, and that removing the typing releases a flood of people who have been waiting to build things. The bottleneck is not typing. It is knowing precisely what you want the software to do, in the kind of detail that makes writing it down the easy part, and no canvas has ever supplied that.

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