Is Google App Inventor A Gateway Drug Or A Doomsday Device For Android?

What a shiny toy! I always loved Basic, Logo, Apple's old Cocoa programming language (the visual app creator, not the framework), and Lego Mindstorms. Some of these environments were better for actual hacking than others, but they were all amusing.

It saddens me to see such a cool toy presented in terms of platform politics, and to see people arguing that allowing more people to write dodgy programs is _bad_. My goodness, I personally wrote a lot of dodgy programs back in school.

It's what Visual Basic was for Windows - it allowed hordes of developers to write GUI applications for the first time.

It's both. A gateway drug and a doomsday device.

It reminds me of Scratch and Borland's ObjectVision. The educational slant is probably a preemptive strike against Microsoft's attemps to capture the higher educational market through free tools and bundles. Seems a natural move.

Doomsday Device? Really Techcrunch? Because all of those WYSIWYG sites were doomsday devices for the web, right?

It's not like the app store (on Android or iOS) is currently composed of nothing but spectacular apps. Most of the apps in both app stores are pretty crappy.

Recommendation is already a very important way that people find apps. I had an iPhone for a year, and I basically never blindly searched the app store. Maybe for a magic 8-ball app. But all the major apps I used were recommended to me by friends with iPhones, mentioned on some blog I read, etc.

And even people that I know that occasionally browse apps browse the "top" pages, which filters out the crap (more-or-less).

Also, it's Google that helped people sort through the crap on the web. If it really becomes a problem, I'm sure they have some people who could develop algorithms to make the good Android apps rise to the top of searches.

Visual Basic got me into programming in middle-school. The way you suck the children in, is to give them a tool like this, with almost instant efficacy, it allows them to grasp that their ideas can be made real, and that it is not as impossible as they might have thought, then you should promptly give them a problem that VisualBasic/Scratch/Inventor cannot solve.

@rbanffy, you and I are on the same page with this one. I just commented in the other section with something along the same lines:

"I saw this on twitter this morning and noticed a glaring similarity in the GUI design and that of MIT's SCRATCH programming language geared at teaching children how to program. They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.

I commend the approach to get more parties interested in programming and mobile web application development. Perhaps this opens up a whole new world of potential for getting mobile applications development into the classroom at a very young age. On the downside, we might end up with an influx of even crappier Android applications in the market. I already have a hard enough time filtering through the crapplications as it is.

Here's the link to SCRATCH for those unaware:"

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Actually, I see two very important use cases that don't seem to be coming up.

1) This should allow devs to get to something resembling a MVP quickly to validate a new idea.

2) I think this will make android the preferred platform for mobile vertical apps., the kind of one-off solutions that are not profitable to bigger players.

Is Techcrunch a sensationalist tabloid or last bastion of quality journalism?

Oh God. Let the crapstorm begin...