The Citizen Coding Platform
Overall Satisfaction with Google App Maker
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We have seen a reduction in time spent on manual processes by being able to automate functions in Google Sheets, take input with special functionality, and have App Maker do the work for us.
- We have seen the internal development queue decrease, which allows us to focus on larger projects that couldn't be handled by App Maker.
- We have seen ownership and process improvements increase in certain departments, as they are able to get to work themselves.
App Maker is really kind of new in its own space. We haven't seen the level of functionality, nor the deep integrations, with anything else. It can replace a lot of products, and we've seen it in place in many applications across our organization, so it's been able to reduce our spend on products that offer specific functionality and still need to be customized.
Do you think Google App Maker (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Google App Maker (discontinued)'s feature set?
Yes
Did Google App Maker (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Google App Maker (discontinued) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Google App Maker (discontinued) again?
Yes