Right now there’s probably nothing hotter than the mobile market, with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android vying for market share (with RIM staying strong as well). And each of these markets like to brag about something they share in common – the apps available on each platform.
In fact, if you watch a lot of television, it would be easy to believe that , “There’s an app for that” applies to all walks of life. And with many hundreds of thousands of apps on the different markets, the truth may not be far from that belief.
Apps to Build Apps
But the market is so competitive that some of the players are not content to attract the developers on the strength of their market and available SDK tools alone. In fact, Google has just recently released a tool that makes it easier than ever to create your own Android apps in order to tilt the app scales back in its favor.
That tool, dubbed appropriately enough App Inventor, allows the builder to create games, access the sensors, use text to speech, and even use the GPS – all without writing a line of code. App Inventor puts the power of app building into the hands of the average user… and on the surface that would seem to be a good thing.
Empowering the Subject Matter Experts
After all, what better person to build an app on, say… shopping, than a professional shopper? Who would know more about playing the piano than a professional piano player? The list goes on, but you can certainly see the argument for empowering the user that is the expert on a subject matter in their field.
Can you just see it – nuclear power experts writing nuclear simulations and bus drivers writing bus schedule apps. In a perfect world this would no doubt be a great way to share knowledge.
The Professional Teacher Paradigm
But we live in the real world, and all too often things that look good on paper do not translate well to the place we all live. Consider the idea that a bus driver should give a class on bus schedules. While no doubt the information would be more accurate than published bus schedules (and perhaps a great deal more revealing about buses in general), I am not certain if the prepared material and lesson plan would be up to par with the rest of the semester. After all, bus drivers are busy driving buses, not planning a class syllabus.
Instead, society has professional teachers. These are the people that take the knowledge from the field and prepare it for distribution in the class room. It would certainly enrich the learning experience to have the bus driver speak to the class on the topic of bus schedules. However, it might be a bit unrealistic to expect the driver to bring his own class schedule for the day and expect it to work smoothly with tomorrow’s lesson. Instead, the teacher ties it all together for the express purpose of the classroom experience that makes it interesting and stimulating for the students.
The Developer Role
Now, much like the teacher is responsible for creating the classroom experience, the developer’s role is to create the user experience. And like the teacher, the developer has to take the information and make it interesting and stimulating to the user. By keeping abreast of the latest SDK changes on presentable interfaces, the developer knows what is available to make the experience pleasurable and practical for the end user.
Without the developer being present, the subject matter expert would no doubt be happy with presenting their wealth of information to the user in the most convenient way they could find. After all, they have buses to drive and nuclear plants to manage. You should not expect the average empowered user to go beyond what a generic tool gives them to create an app.
Beyond the mechanics of the app, you should probably expect a subject matter expert to speak in subject matter terms. For example, the nuclear power manager may use a lot of terms that would all but alienate the casual user wanting to learn more about a nuclear plant by downloading an app. So, is there no way that a subject matter expert can use their intimate knowledge in the market? Of course there is.
A Ghost of a Writer
The idea of pairing up a professional content writer with a subject matter expert has been happening for many years. How many great tell all books by generals, presidents, and celebrities have been written or co-written with the help of a professional writer? Let me save you some time and ask it this way – how many can you find that have not been co-written?
The literary arts have used the combination of professional writer and subject matter experts (even in an autobiography, the term applies) to great success. And as general apps continue to mature in both information and capability, this is where I see the future of app development heading.
Future Collaborations and Branding
As apps progress, I think we should see more collaborative efforts between expert and developer. This plays a part not only in delivering the best app for the subject matter, but it also helps greatly in branding and promoting the app itself.
By tying together the expert and the developer, the end user gets the best of both worlds. That is, the user gets an informative app that is still pleasant to use and up-to-date with the latest technology.
The Developer Future
Now, not all developer efforts need to be tied to a subject matter expert to be a good app. A lot of games that are focused on action would gain little by having a celebrity endorsement. And the most cutting edge game that delivers the best experience will get the market. But for the majority of the games on the market – well, they are already a bit cookie cutter by inspection. It would be easy to see how these type of games could be generated by future app generators.
Instead the developer needs to distinguish themselves in a crowded market. For that, teaming with a subject matter expert might be just the ticket. And as time goes on, it might be that we google for the name on the development team to determine an app’s worthiness even before we check out the screen shot. And that could be a paradigm shift in the app market to make the market stronger and better.
Enjoyed the article, but a couple of points came to mind.
One: professional developers are going nowhere. If you’ve been a professional software developer and worked with users on a day-to-day basis, this would be plain as day. Users may be experts in their field, but 99% of the time, they are terrible software developers. It doesn’t matter how good and easy to use the tools are, the difficult parts of developing a complex, functioning, and intuitive application cannot be abstracted with different or better tools. Software development on any platform is so much more than dragging and dropping action blocks into place, and you’ve likely insulted some developers with the title, insinuating that their job is somehow threatened because app development tools just got that much easier to use for people that don’t know how to program.
Secondly, user-centered software development is nothing new… why does the world act as if we need an entirely new set of paradigms for developing software, just because mobile development finally got popular? We don’t. It’s true that these new tools might get people interested in making apps out of the things they love, but in the same way that Geocities and online WYSIWYG website builders made everyday people excited about websites. At the end of the day, we have 100 000 “App Inventor” apps on the market, and nobody can stand to use them because they’re made by people who don’t understand how to make a piece of software. Point is, this is already how all good software is already designed – with the user in mind.
Nah, devs are fine
I could find some tool like “App Inventor ” for app development tasks thanks for the informative post .
Apps world is a kind of walled garden. Instead of the concept of creating apps for everything, why not use what’s already existing on the internet.
Also I believe that coders are still needed to generate a complex app though as you said simple apps can raise exponentially if we have an easy to use tool.
I think developers will still be needed for the resources and for assistance. I created a DIY mobile site with http://www.unitymobile.com and although much of it was done strictly by me I did need assistance from the developers.