The Citizen Coding Platform
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
App Maker is our internal "citizen developer" platform at work. Any department is free to use it to create apps and automate common tasks, though it's used most by our sales engineering department as a great way to deploy internal applications and departmental assistance pieces with minimal cost and effort. It's a fast way for non-developers (though they do need some experience with coding) to take care of things without submitting to the dev queue and waiting for the internal development team to jump on a small project.
Pros
- Minimal coding experience required. Javascript is a must-have, but the documentation is excellent, and once you're past the learning curve, it's great!
- Great WYSIWYG editor. It's easy to see the layout and still have deep control over what you're putting together.
- Excellent integrations with G Suite. There are methods built-in that allow you to easily authenticate and work with the G Suite APIs.
Cons
- Definitely not for beginners. App Maker certainly isn't usable by "everybody," but it's excellent for those who are willing to learn and get their hands dirty!
- Experienced developers will have issues. The target user is someone who doesn't want to (or know how to) use something like App Engine or Kubernetes. People with more experience will certainly see limitations and find it difficult to use to the fullest extent.
- Data sources can be iffy to manage. It used to be that App Maker would use a sheet or "Drive table" as a data source, but it now requires a GCP data source like CloudSQL.
Likelihood to Recommend
App Maker is exceptionally strong when you need things to just get done, but your internal development team has a full queue. Or maybe you don't even <i>have</i> an internal development team! If you need a check-in system, an applicant tracking system, an office cleaning checklist with notifications and reports, etc. you can use App Maker to throw something together and make sure your team can use it. You can also collaborate on it, so teams can make this part of their process improvement goals.
