Google’s ‘App Inventor’ Makes Developers Out Of Anyone

Google's App Inventor for Android

Industry observers are estimating that Google’s Android Market will blow by 100,000 applications by the end of the month. That will be much easier now thanks to a new Google (NSDQ: GOOG) tool that makes it easy for non-techies to build mobile applications for Android phones.

At the end of last year, Android had only 12,000 applications in existence (at the same time Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had about 100,000), so the Google platform really is on a roll. This new tool called “App Inventor,” developed by Google Labs, could potentially bring those numbers into parity even faster.

After a year of development, and tests occurring in classrooms around the country, Google has built a software program that lets you build applications, ranging from simple games like Whack-A-Mole to creating a quiz app to help you study for a test. The apps can tap into a phone’s the accelerometer, GPS, or even Android’s text-to-speech capabilities. Google says that you need no programming knowledge, and rather than writing code, you “visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

In May, Nokia released a wizard that let you develop an application for Ovi in seven simple steps. The wizard isn’t particularly fancy, and instead relies heavily on using things such as RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other feeds. Similar tools are also available for the iPhone, which let you build applications based another of pre-developed features, but they typically aren’t free.

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