[primitivesuave]

I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.

[sgt]

Yes, you generally always run into something that the company building your low code tools will need to cater for or fix for you somehow. It gives you so much grief that you might as well write and own your tools.

[swyx]

its not a binary.. first of all there are tons of people who have software needs who just dont have that option. Whats the solution, hire you? you're expensive, and you have your own backlog to deal with. *they are bottlenecked by you*.

second of all flutterflow (and other code-exporting builders like webflow) generates code you can take over, so it can even be helpful to people who could code it themselves, all it has to do is save some substantial time, which as a UI builder myself a WYSIWYG tool always does.

[fakedang]

This. I tried out Flutter Flow a few days back. I was able to do a ton of boring design work very productively, as well as the Firebase integration gamut, but I can't see myself coding app logic with the existing setup.

[primitivesuave]

Awesome, thank you for this insight! Does it generate quality code?

[fakedang]

For layouts and basic UI, definitely. But backend integration was a bit convoluted and I think difficult to decipher by design. Like if you expect to just do the stuff on the web app, then download code and make changes, nope not going to happen. You'll have to spend some time with each of the files you downloaded.

[petra]

No-code is is limited.

I've read about an hospital management system implemented by low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels, maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing, control over the platform, or just general resistance by software developers.

So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher productivity platform take in the software industry ?

[poisonborz]

Depends on your use case. I'd say everything that is easily adaptable to a certain amount of common settings, is already there: run of the mill webshops, static websites/blogs/cms-es, forms, "info card" apps. And even with these, run if you want to think outside the box. More complex scenarios require so many knobs and switches that anyone working on them has to become a quasi-developer of a much worse and restrictive "language", akin to SAP or Liferay. So other than that above, put all the "no-code" tech besides "disruptive ai big data blockchain augmented reality platform".

[kiawe_fire]

IMO, the answer lies somewhere in between.

The biggest benefit I see from the low code movement is, what I hope, will be a trend in bespoke apps where devs like myself spend less time building a single user experience and more time architecting a cohesive system with bespoke “low code” tools on top, that can help enable non-engineer power users to then work within that business-specific framework to craft the screens and user experiences that the masses then use.

Essentially a way to keep the devs doing more actual engineering and architecture work while the more accessible things like “move this button” or “create a screen that shows this data we already have” can be made more accessible to more people.

That said, I think general purpose low code solutions meant for all businesses and industries will be more for the MVP / rapid prototyping stages for the most part.

But I could well be proven wrong!

[swiley]

Most "apps" are really replacements for simple web pages because of the way Apple is distorting computing.

[antris]

I don't know where this Apple dig is coming from. Most applications are just putting a bunch of strings into database and displaying strings from a database. This has always been the case with or without Apple, and it works the same way regardless of platform.

[pjmlp]

That has been the case for most applications since green phosphor displays, just plain CRUD forms.

Works perfectly well for 90% of most businesses.

[wpietri]

I think the point is more to take a set of common problems out of the software industry. The classic example for me here is the spreadsheet. For many of its uses, it's definitely not as good as bespoke software, but also way better than paying for a dedicated app development team.