There’s lots of talk and hype around no-code and low-code tools. It's an attractive goal, the promise of no-code is bringing programming to everyone. Allowing people to build solutions that previously were domain of software engineers.
Why it matters: mobile app development is expensive requiring teams of product, design and engineers.
Where’s the business: there’s a trend in startups to provide tools for anyone to create the work traditionally done by experts. Example: Canva is a $6billion valuation that lets anyone create graphics content.
Summary: They're generally good for quickly getting something working. Some such situations (websites, data forms) they're very effective, whilst mobile apps development is still limited.
Deep Dive
My opinion: for effective product market testing, I feel it’s still more effective to code a mobile app. Especially with the combination of: Android Play Store, Flutter, Firebase and Material Design and freelancers. This provides a fast to market MVP with solid customer analytics built in.
Where it's not good:
- It's not a panacea and many tools will be frustratingly limiting in it's features.
- For iterative product development, does not come with the analytics tools.
- For mobile apps: it just too painful.
Types of no-code: no-code is really broad and there are different tools for different scenarios and use cases. For example, some of the well known ones:
- Bubble.io allows creating web applications with drag and drop.
- Webflow for building sophisticated websites.
- Airtable for data entry and spreadsheet type solutions.
- Adalo for mobile apps
There are a lot of resources and a good place to start is ProductHunt:
Showcase: Glide
Glide is a great example of no-code and it's a painless entry into no-code with lots of templates and examples to modify.
- Provides: a very simple drag drop approach to creating a website that mimics a mobile app. Data is stored on Google Sheets.
- Yet it's also frustratingly limited in features. Everything has to work the way Glide provides it.
Further Reading
Medium
