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Google made headlines today by announcing the App Inventor, an easy WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for Android apps. While most seem to be thrilled with the idea, I am not convinced that it is going to be a positive thing for the smart phone market. At least not in the short term.

The App Inventor is a drag-and-drop visual editor for designing Android application. As Google puts it,

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

Wait… NO programming knowledge?  And this is supposed to be a good thing?  This is similar in functionality to the early WYSIWYG html editors we saw in the early 2000’s. And therein lies my objection. After editors like Microsoft FrontPage and DreamWeaver hit the market, everybody and their neighbor’s dog was creating web pages - and most of them sucked. And yes, that is a technical term.

Now the argument can be made that the WYSIWYGs proved to be a good thing for the web. Giving everybody, including people without training (or a sense of color) the ability to easily create web pages actually helped create the need for professional web development, and the App Inventor will likely do the same. So in the long run, this will be a good thing. But in the mean time, we are going to be inundated with horrible looking, poorly functioning smart phone apps.

I hope the Android market is ready for the onslaught of Android apps that look like this: http://anselme.homestead.com/AFPHAITI.html