(Cross-posted from The Keyword )
It’s easy to get used to doing things a certain way. This can be a good thing if you're prepping for the World Cup, where process, repetition and routine can make you a champion. But if you're like the rest of us who rely on certain workflows to get things done at work—like budgeting or filing expenses—“trusting the process” doesn’t always feel rewarding.
Today, we’re making App Maker generally available to help you rethink how your teams operate. App Maker is G Suite’s low-code application development environment that makes it easy for teams to build custom apps to speed up workflows and make processes better.
Apps to fill business gaps, built for your needs
Analysts estimate that the right custom mobile app can
save each employee 7.5 hours per week (that’s a week’s worth of lunch breaks!). Yet, too few businesses have the means, let alone the resources, to invest time and effort in building custom apps. Why? Because their IT budget centers on big enterprise apps like CRM, ERP and SCM and beyond those priorities, IT executives’ attention focuses on security and governance.
App Maker was created to enable your line-of-business teams to build apps for the jobs these bigger apps don't tackle. With App Maker, you can shape company processes like requesting purchase orders, or you can speed up business workflows like filing and resolving help desk tickets, as if you designed and built the processes
yourself .
“Pooling talent resources was always an ad hoc process, but App Maker let us quickly build an app that tracks allocation requests in detail.”
- Peter McAuley, Director of IT, EA
Take Electronic Arts (EA) for example, a global interactive entertainment software company that makes games and more. To create many of its games, EA has to occasionally allocate staff resources to different projects—whether it’s a designer needed on a new game project or an HR consultant to advise on setting up a studio. EA’s IT department used App Maker to create a custom app to streamline capital resourcing.
“Pooling talent resources was always an ad hoc process, but App Maker let us quickly build an app that tracks allocation requests in detail,” says Peter McAuley, director of IT at EA. “Our custom app also calculates and provides management with a view of total resource utilization by month, something which was always more of a chore to put together manually.”
Over the last few months, we've worked closely with customers and partners around the world, including EA, Colgate-Palmolive, SADA Systems and more, to build apps to solve specific business needs.
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Powerful new database model and governance
Since
launching App Maker in our Early Adopter Program, we've made changes and added new features to make it even better for our customers.
Open: App Maker now offers built-in support for Cloud SQL (GCP account required), offering high performance, scalability and convenience. It also supports a Bring Your Own Database (“BYODB”) model, letting you connect it to your own database using JDBC or a REST API .
Fast: Responsive templates , samples , a drag-and-drop UI design and declarative data modeling make it easier for IT developers, or anyone who wants to automate work, to design and build apps even faster.
Managed: In the coming weeks, G Suite administrators will have visibility over the apps running in their organization including owners, usage metrics and OAuth permissions. Expanded OAuth Whitelisting controls mean administrators will also be able to prevent apps from running without their approval. Learn more.
Get started
App Maker is now available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers, as well as
G Suite for Education customers.
Learn more , or see how you can get started with
documentation and
this codelab . We can’t wait to see what your companies build with it.
Additional details for G Suite admins
App Maker is now turned on for your G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, or Enterprise for Education domain, unless you’re a K–12 G Suite for Education customer or you’ve chosen to
manually opt in to new services . If App Maker isn’t yet enabled for your eligible domain, you can turn it on in the Apps > Additional Google services section of the Admin console.
App Maker comes with built-in support for
Google Cloud SQL , which requires a Google Cloud Platform account. To set up Cloud SQL for your domain, follow the steps outlined in this
Help Center article . You can also connect App Maker to your own database using JDBC or a REST API.
As a G Suite admin, you can manage the use of App Maker in your domain. For example, you can view the activity of users creating App Maker apps using the
Drive audit logs , or view the activity of end users of App Maker apps in the
OAuth Token audit logs . For more information on the management capabilities available to G Suite admins, visit the
Help Center .
App Maker is now an
additional Google service , but it offers
24x7 technical support and service-level commitments . It is also compliant with ISO
27001 and SOC (
1 ,
2 ,
3 ) and offers
accessibility features to help meet the needs of your users.
At launch, however, App Maker is not ISO 27017 and 27018 compliant. Please note that this corrects our previous communication.
For more information on App Maker, check out the
Help Center .
Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release
Editions:
Available to G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, and Enterprise for Education editions only
Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)
Impact:
Admins and end users
Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI
More Information
Help Center: App Maker
Help Center: Manage App Maker in your domain
App Maker site
App Maker developers guide
Launch release calendar Launch detail categories Get these product update alerts by email Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates
