How Android Will Beat iPhone: Google Gives Away App Inventor
By Anna Johnson on July 13th, 2010Google sure isn’t relying on handset makers nor app developers to make its Android mobile operating system the market leading smartphone platform (and beat Apple’s iPhone in the process). It’s hitting Apple where it hurts by giving away ‘App Inventor’ – an application just about anyone can use to easily make applications for Android.
While Apple has fiercely maintained a CLOSED environment for the iPhone – where it controls not just what apps developers can make but also what users can do with their iPhone – Google is taking the OPEN approach to a new level by proactively giving people tools to develop for Android.
App Inventor promises to make it super easy for anyone to create an app. For one thing, you don’t need to be a programmer or know any programming code. Instead, you just design how you want your app to look and then use ‘blocks’ to specify what you want the app to do.
Essentially, making an app is a matter of combining certain blocks together. Check out Google’s App Inventor information for more details (including a helpful video) but it seems you can use blocks for:
“just about everything you can do with an Android phone, as well as blocks for doing ‘programming-like’ stuff – 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.”
Releasing App Inventor is a GREAT strategic move on Google’s part. Not only will it make it much easier and faster for developers to create Android apps, but it will also potentially bring many more people and businesses into the Android app development fold.
Even if a lot or most of these apps aren’t any good (after all there will be no quality standards to meet) just giving people a tool to easily create apps promises to expand interest in, and usage of, the Android platform. It’s a classic example of promoting a network effect – in this case, the Android network.
Apple may well be justified in seeking to control its iPhone operating system – iPhone OS – in order to ensure a high quality experience for iPhone users. History shows, however, that a more open approach – where there are no restrictions on who can develop what – leads to market dominance.
Encouraging third party development was exactly how Microsoft’s Windows operating system became the dominant operating system for the personal computer in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, in relation to mobile operating systems, Google is taking this open approach even further. It’s not just allowing all kinds of app development; with App Creator it is handing everyone the tools to develop those apps.
