App Maker speeds up company processes with custom apps

Recently, Google has made the App Maker generally available. Its main purpose is to make it easy for teams to build custom apps to speed up workflows and make processes better. The G Suite low-code development environment is included with G Suite Business and Enterprise editions, as well as, with G Suite for Education.

Why do you need custom apps?

According to CDW, the right custom mobile app can save each employee 7.5 hours per week. In addition to that, companies that use custom apps record an average revenue gain of 16%. Businesses are realising these benefits and are allocating more of their budget on custom mobile apps and related technologies. Global Mobile Enterprise Business Application Revenue reported that the mobile enterprise app market will nearly double from 2012 to 2018, growing from $31 billion to approximately $61 billion.

How does App Maker help?

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, travel forms, employee appraisals, document approval and change request control forms, or you can speed up business workflows like filing and resolving help desk tickets, as if you designed and built the processes yourself.

App Maker 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. It also has 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.

Whether it’s Gmail, Calendar or Sheets, App Maker makes it a cinch to connect with the data and services you need, all while making your apps more powerful. Plus, you can use Apps Script to access over 40 Google services, Google Cloud Platform and other third-party services that support JDBC and REST. 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. It is also compliant with ISO 27001 and SOC (1, 2, 3) and offers accessibility features to help meet the needs of users.

Who has benefitted from App Maker?

Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) is one of the organisations that are reaping the benefits of App Maker. SPH decided to migrate all of their apps from Lotus Notes to App Maker and Google Apps Script. They use App Maker to build custom apps for approval workflow for IT request and story request. They have chosen App Maker because of its low-code requirements and fast deployment as it doesn’t need to be hosted. This also makes it easier to update and roll out. Since implementing the custom apps, SPH has managed to save a lot of time and money in their daily operations.

Organisations are just starting to explore possibilities presented by custom apps. There is a significant opportunity to use apps to drive business transformation and competitive advantage, and not just support day-to-day tasks. With simple app building tools like App Maker, app investment will continue to grow, especially as apps become more integrated with business strategy.