Make a business app without writing a single line of code

If you’ve been here before, you know that I always express skepticism when I encounter this kind of claim. But when someone like Scott Hanselman tweets it, then I pay attention and will give it a shot. That’s what I did and here is how it went.

I visited the site, followed the link to create an app, picked a template/example and simply accepted all defaults. I chose to download the source codes. Within about 3 minutes I had three apps downloaded to my mac. The web site looks clean, it’s easy to follow.

App Control panel
App Control panel

There’s an option to download the fully built and ready-to-go app.

Trigger app build process App's being prepared for download Download your app

When you install the app, you get something that is really basic but functioning.

login view

main view

I then loaded the iOS version on Xcode to take a look at the source code. Browsing around I saw a source tree that is reasonably well organised, clean, simple and straightforward. You see that it doesn’t have much feature. I wouldn’t call this a foundation to base anything evolved on, but the basic hierarchical navigation views are in place.

Sample app in Xcode

I tried to build from Xcode and straight away the code wouldn’t compile. I saw there were missing dependencies, could try to solve that manually but decided to use cocoapod for that (everybody does these days). Indeed the presence of podspec file was another give away. After refreshing the dependencies, the code still wouldn’t compile, the Test target failed. So I deleted the Test target, then the code runs. I couldn’t be bothered to spend much time on this.

There’s also Android and Windows app source codes available. I didn’t take time to go through those, but I expect they would be similar: basic structure, quick and easy, but not much feature to see. To be honest, the basic app structure created by Xcode would be much like what you get here, one benefit is that through the theme feature of the web site, it’s possible to make it a bit more proprietary and get going.

Brief summary

For a beta service, this looks like a good start. It certainly will help people who just need a decent looking prototype to get started. The concept of App Builder, aiming at people who don’t want to write code, seems to be in motion. I’m not sure how much success they’re getting, but it is worth checking them out regularly. There might be situations where even a professional developer would want to get something simple out quickly, particularly throwaway ephemeral apps that are not worth over-engineering. This one looks good for that kind of purpose. For more elaborate needs however, writing code is still going to win the day.

To write good code, you need to think carefully about what you’re trying to do, what the context is and what the constraints are, then design a solution that cater for those things.