Google App Maker, which starts at $10 per user per month as part of G Suite Business, is a low-code development tool built into Google's G Suite productivity platform. Built with a clean, responsive user experience (UX) according to Google's Material Design philosophy, App Maker gives business users and developers within a company the ability to quickly develop apps for specific business processes, relying entirely on form wizards and drag-and-drop interfaces to build good-looking business apps without the need for any traditional coding.
Along with Editors' Choice Appian (Visit Site at Appian) , Google App Maker was the most user-friendly tool we tested for average Joe business users. Microsoft PowerApps (7.00 Per User Per Month at PowerApps) , our Editors' Choice for developers, boasted a slick experience as well, but geared more toward IT and power users. Developed more recently and with a more consistent design philosophy in mind, App Maker and PowerApps give you a simple and more cohesive guided experience when building apps than a tool such as Salesforce App Cloud (Visit Site at Salesforce.com) , which packs a far more comprehensive set of tooling and customization features, but in an overloaded experience that can be more confusing to learn and navigate. Announced in 2016 and available in G Suite Business for the first time this year, Google App Maker is a far younger platform than Salesforce or Appian. It's got some growing up to do, but App Maker gives you a simple, intuitive low-code development experience that serves as a natural extension of G Suite for custom business app creation.
Pricing and Plans
Google App Maker isn't available at the entry level G Suite Basic tier. Only customers with G Suite Business ($10 per user per month) or G Suite Enterprise have access to the low-code tool. Per-user pricing is a touch more expensive than Zoho Creator (Starts at $8 Per User Per Month, Billed Annually at Zoho Creator) ($5 per month) and Microsoft PowerApps ($7 per month), but a bargain compared to Salesforce App Cloud ($25 per month) and Appian, which starts at $75 per user per month.
Similar Products
Microsoft PowerApps
Appian
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Salesforce App Cloud
The other feature and capability advantages of G Suite Business over the basic edition include managed security keys and data loss prevention (DLP), along with more advanced reporting and audit trail capabilities. G Suite Business also comes with unlimited storage across Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive (Try it Free at Google Store) , which is important to App Maker because of the Google Drive Tables and data models you'll be pulling into your apps. If there are four or fewer users in your organization, each user gets 1 TB of storage.
Building a Low-Code Business App
The App Maker setup begins with a welcome tutorial to introduce you to the dashboard and links to various other tutorials and feature walkthroughs in the user manual. The welcome tutorial walks you through an interactive 15-minute process to build your first app, starting with building a data model in Google Drive. App Maker is broken up into three main components to build your app: data, pages, and scripts. As an everyday business user with no coding experience, you'll largely only be using the first two. We'll get deeper into the scripts element of the experience in our developer-focused testing section. The interface is clean and easy to navigate, changing colors depending on what section you're in (green for data, blue for pages) as part of Google's Material Design.
Before you start customizing your app and adding features, Google takes you through the bare bones right away to make sure the foundation is there. You start by creating and naming your database, which you can format as a Google Drive Table or upload your own data source. You then add various fields to organize your data, which can be classified by strings of Unicode characters, numbers, dates, or true/false Boolean statements. If at any point you don't know what a term means, the tutorial includes links along the way to App Maker's documentation.
Once you've got your data source, the form-based wizard takes you into Pages. This is where you'll find App Maker's Property Editor with options to customize the user interface (UI), but at first glance (if you're going through the tutorial), all App Maker wants you to do is name your page and connect it to the data source you just created. Apps don't work without a data source. Every widget you add to the app from this point on will pull data from the Drive Table you've set.
The drag-and-drop widget editor is how you actually build what your app will look like from screen to screen. To test these apps from an average business user's perspective, I built a basic scheduling app. The goal was to build an app that could add a new event with fields for event name, date and time, and, duration, and the ability to invite users to events and sort the events list in a calendar or chronological view. Any additional features or customization on top of that was a bonus.
After going through the walkthrough tutorial, I had no issues with the basic app creation process in Google App Maker. From the left-hand navigation menu I chose Create New App. Google currently offers nine different templates for different business apps, but in this instance I simply chose the Blank Application template. The current template selection is a far cry from the full-fledged AppExchange marketplace in Salesforce App Cloud, but it's a solid starting point for creating apps around everyday processes like document approval or employee directories.
After creating my Google Drive Table in the Data section, I tabbed down to Pages. The walkthrough had showed me what to look for, in the Property Editor on the right-hand side of the interface, I chose the "datasource" field and connected my model, listed in the drop-down. There's plenty more you can do in the Property Editor as far as customization goes—such as layout, spacing, and margins—or if you click the paint palette icon atop the column it'll take you to the style editor where you can switch design styles or customize CSS. Scripts are where you add more complex logic and automated workflows, but for the average business user the Property and Style Editors can handle all basic UI customization for those so inclined to mess with colors, display, etc.
The actual drag-and-drop layout process was as simple as it gets. The widgets icon on the top left of the Pages interface pops out a bar with different data options (forms and tables), input objects such as text, date, or check boxes, drop-down lists, buttons, sliders, five-star rating widgets, and more. Below that are additional display widgets to add multimedia and hyperlinks, as well as integrated Google services like Maps.
I added a Form widget with fields for Event Date, Event Time, and Participants, dragging the table to where I wanted it in the app layout. Next to that, I dragged a sortable table showing created events, filterable by the parameters in my form. To tie my user flow together, I added a Button widget named Save Event, and an interactive Google Maps widget that (if I connected a location API in the Scripts section) could show the location of my event if I added another field with that value. With the primary functions of my app now created, I hit the preview button. Before Google App Maker would publish my app, a few prompts popped up to quickly review permissions, authorizing that my PCMag Scheduling App had access to Google Drive to pull from my data model, and giving the app permission to run.
In the published app, I was immediately able to fill out my form with event dates/times and participants, and see those events show up on my events list. One current drawback is that App Maker doesn't currently support native mobile apps, only responsive web apps that will dynamically adjust based on screen size. Google is also considering adding built-in integrations with other popular data sources besides Google Drive, and plans to build some of its varied machine intelligence capabilities into the experience as well throughout the second half of 2017.
The Developer Experience
On the developer and IT-focused side of our testing, our developer tested App Maker by creating a significantly more complex application we named Crowd Control, a collaborative contact manager intended as a contact and customer relationship management (CRM) application for salespeople. We were looking to create an app with a contact list, a page for contact details, and a page for adding new contacts, including the ability to add photos and multiple notes to each contact. We also tested out the ability to add and change data model fields and push those changes to the live app.
App Maker most closely resembled Zoho and PowerApps in look and functionality. There was definitely a geekier feel to the tool, however, which might intimidate complete neophytes. Fields were prefaced with an '@' everywhere and power tools like regular expressions were right there, too. These define how to match and validate strings using a mini-language. Regular expressions are very powerful, but can be fairly complex and likely wouldn't be useful to a non-programmer.
The Data modeler or entity tool was very easy to use and allowed for all variations of relationship cardinality, something PowerApps lacked and Zoho successfully hid from its users. Relationship cardinality essentially means "how many of A are related to how many of B," which in this case means the notes and multimedia associated with a contact. However, whereas PowerApps had a huge variety of pre-defined entities and pick lists, App Maker had none, so defining those relationships is manual.
The Page designer tool was easy to use in most respects. Moving components around worked as you would expect with simple drag-and-drop, though changing the layout could be a bit difficult. It was easier to just start over on the panel and tweaking the spacing and margins required a little trial and error. Also, there was no horizontal scrolling in the designer. Vertical scrolling worked fine, but from a developer perspective the lack of horizontal scrolling made playing with the design problematic, and the Property Editor overall was somewhat cluttered. Zoho was a little cleaner in this respect, and PowerApps was far more polished.
When it came to additional customization and scripting, all the code is written in JavaScript. Whether that is good or bad depends on your programming language preference, but generally we found it to be a plus since it's a widely supported language with all the features you could need. It isn't going to be terribly friendly to a non-programmer, however. App Maker also includes a couple of other nifty coder features, including a Code Completion drop-down in the scripting dashboard to see all available methods for a script, and scripting hints and warnings as you code both client and server-side scripts and API integrations with other Google apps and services.
App Maker also performed well when making changes to the Crowd Control data model, a task a programmer would often need to perform for project maintenance. Adding a new field was easy, but it required some more steps than in other tools like Zoho and Appian. It did take some hunting around to find out how to add, but was simple despite the required number of steps. Changing an existing field was easy and executed flawlessly with no left-over legacy naming or extra hoops to jump through. Overall, our programmer found that this is likely a tool that a developer would be comfortable with right off the bat.
A Smartly Designed Up-and-Comer
Google App Maker is the newest low-code tool featured in this roundup, but even so there's a lot to like in its consistent, straightforward design and comprehensive set of form builders and drag-and-drop capabilities. For the average business user—particularly one familiar with Material Design—the platform provides an easy guided experience to create a business process application that looks professional, integrates with other Google apps and services, and, most importantly, should work reliably.
From a developer perspective, Google App Maker lacks the polish of Microsoft PowerApps and the scripting ease Zoho Creator, but the UI and data model were easy to use and it handled changes to the data model flawlessly. It would be nice if there was a much larger set of pre-defined resources available, such as field data types, app templates, entities, and similar features. The horizontal scrolling needs to be sorted out, and the UI properties panel requires more thought, too. However, all that isn't surprising for a newly built product with plenty of growing up to do, and Google has a strong foundation on which to build an even more powerful low-code experience. Google App Maker is built simply and effectively, and overall was one of the easiest low-code tools to use from both a normal user and an IT standpoint. For G Suite Business customers, it's well worth taking for a spin.
Google App Maker is a young low-code development tool with some growing up to do, but boasts a straightforward design, intuitive app creation process, and strong visual-oriented features to make G Suite app building a breeze for business users and developers alike.
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