Google Unveils DIY Android App Builder

Google has launched an Android app builder tool that can be used by people without any programming skills.

The main aim of this free, browser-based tool, known as Google Ap Inventor for Android, is to make life easier for existing developers trying to create software for Android devices. However, Google has said that the beta tool has also been extensively tested among groups of “amateur” developers who are not computer experts, including schoolchildren, nursing students and university graduates.

“To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge,” said Google. “This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behaviour.”

Drag And Drop

Google is hoping that this WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor will lead more and more people to develop Apps for Android, and close the massive lead its chief rival, Apple, currently enjoys in the Apps market. Apple of course opts for a much more tightly controlled approach to application development, and strictly controls the software and vets all programs.

Google said that its App Inventor team had created “blocks for just about everything you can do with an Android phone, as well as blocks for doing ‘programming-like’ stuff”. These blocks include blocks to store information, blocks for repeating actions, and blocks to perform actions under certain conditions. There are even blocks to talk to services like Twitter and access GPS sensors and other handset features.

Google has released a video (on Youtube) which shows how a pet owner creates an Android app in just over a minute using drag and drop techniques. The finished app plays a meowing noise when a picture of a cat is clicked on an Android phone. Google is quick to emphasise that more sophisticated apps can also be developed.

According to the New York Times, Google App Inventor for Android has been under development for a year now. Google believes that as mobile phones become increasingly sophisticated and the primary device that people most rely on, users should be able to make applications themselves.

Open Apps

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project, told the New York Times.

“We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” Abelson said. “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world, but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.”

Abelson is also a founding director of the Free Software Foundation and it is thought that the OpenBlocks Java library used by Google App Inventor for Android, was originally created by MIT.

Of course, this development tool will only work with Android-based handsets and budding app developers will need to sign-up with a Google Gmail account.

Late last week, Google pushed out an updated version of its software development kit (SDK) for the Android 2.2 operating system (codenamed Froyo).