Custom Android apps easy as 1-2-3 with Google App Inventor

Google App Inventor for Android enables you to create your own Android apps. You don’t have to know any code to create mobile apps for Android phone with App Inventor, a new tool in Google Labs. Use App Inventor to drag and drop the essential building blocks of smartphone apps to create unique Android functionality from scratch.

Resource for this article: Google App Inventor for Android lets everyone create custom apps by Personal Money Store

Android market gets a jolt with App Inventor

As smartphones become the computers individuals rely on most, people should be able to create their own apps, Google said in Monday’s announcement of App Inventor for Android . The New York Times reports that App Inventor is another element of Google’s strategy to gain the upper hand in the Android market by opening its technology to all developers. Apple, Google’s arch smartphone rival, has notoriously strict rules about app development for the iPhone. The strategy seems to be working within the Android/Apple battle. Within the first quarter this year, Android phones outsold Apple’s iPhone.

Geeks up in arms over App Inventor

The concept behind App Inventor is that if every person could be app creators, Android will supplant Apple’s iPhone as the dominant smartphone platform. Geeks in the upper echelons of the programming world do not like this part of Google’s Android/Apple market strategy. Tech Crunch calls App Inventor “ugly” and wonders if it is either a “gateway drug for Android app development” or “a Doomsday device that will muck up native app development on the platform” . Tech Crunch laments the rise of WYSIWYG HTML editors, saying the tools that made it easy for anybody to create web pages quickly filled the web with garbage.

Treasure or trash – the market will let you know

App Inventor is a reflection of the low bar that has been set by the quality of Android apps so far, said Larry Dignan at ZDNet. He said Android, as well as iPhone have numerous apps that are simply useless. However, the beauty of App Inventor is that “useless is within the eye of the beholder”. There can be clunkers but marketplace demand will choose what is or is not useless. Apple’s App Store at the moment has more than 225,000 apps for sale. With the introduction of App Inventor, AndroidLib estimates the Android market will easily have more than 100,000 mobile apps.

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