Mozilla Appmaker

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

~ the last words ~

The repository opened on 22 July 2013 and the pitch was in the name. Appmaker was a Mozilla Foundation tool for making a mobile app without learning to program: you dragged components into a canvas in your browser and wired one component's event to another's input. What came out ran on a phone. The components were called bricks and the metaphor was the obvious one. It went to public beta on 15 July 2014.

Under the canvas it was web components, custom HTML tags built on Polymer, which was Google's library. A brick was a tag with a few inputs and a few events, and an app was those tags wired to each other in a document. That is a genuinely elegant way to model what a beginner is doing when they connect a button to a sound, and it also meant the output was a web app rather than anything a store would recognize as native.

On 11 August 2015 the Mozilla Foundation published a note saying Appmaker and Popcorn Maker would stop working after 30 September. The reason given was capacity: the same people were needed on the Webmaker app for Android, which was the mobile bet that mattered more. Existing projects stayed visible in read-only form after the date, the code stayed on GitHub for anyone who wanted to run it, and Mozilla stopped answering bugs.

~ the record ~

~ who it was built for ~

Appmaker belonged to a Mozilla program aimed at people whose first computer was going to be a cheap smartphone, in the same markets Firefox OS was supposed to win. The theory was that if the web could be read on those handsets it could be written on them too, and that the writing tool had to assume no prior code. It is a good theory. It also required a phone platform Mozilla ended up not having, since Firefox OS was dropped as a carrier product that December, ten weeks after Appmaker stopped.

I write code for a living, so a tool whose whole point is to make that unnecessary was never pointed at me, and I would have reached for a text editor before reaching for a canvas of bricks. That is exactly the reflex it existed to route around. Every generation of this idea gets built by programmers who are not its users, which is part of why so few of them survive contact with a budget review.

~ the notice ~

The shutdown note is worth reading for its tone, because it is what a shutdown looks like when the people writing it are not lawyers. It names the replacement for each tool and it tells you exactly where your old work will still be visible, at webmaker.org/me, signed in. It calls sunsetting Popcorn Maker a very difficult decision and says teachers had come to rely on it, which is a thing a company usually leaves out. Seven weeks of notice is not generous, but the read-only archive meant nothing a classroom had made vanished on the date.

~ what is left ~

The repository was archived on 30 March 2019 with 430 stars and 190 forks, and its description was rewritten in the past tense: an exploration in making app authoring available to non-developers. The README tells you to go read the blog post about why it stopped. Four years between the switch-off and the archive flag is a long time for a project to sit undead in public.

~ the idea outlived the tool ~

The idea did not die with the tool. Drag components onto a canvas and publish the result to a URL is the entire premise of the no-code industry that showed up a few years later and raised money Mozilla was never going to spend. What Appmaker had that most of them do not is the assumption that the person building the app owns the result.

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