Why building an app is now child’s play

“If a police officer moves to another city or remote area for work, members should be able to locate the nearest police station and find other members. They should also be able to seek assistance,” he said.

But there was a problem. He didn’t know how to code. This is where tech platform Appy Pie helped them accomplish this task successfully. name we birds togetherSirohi now has around 6,000 members on the app.

The Appy Pie platform allows anyone to build an app without any prior coding knowledge by simply dragging and dropping features, and is therefore known as a ‘no-code’ platform. Such platforms assist users with visual tools to build apps, chatbots, dashboards, mobile and web apps, and even content management platforms. Appy Pie also helps publish these apps on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. In short, such platforms have made building and publishing apps almost a child’s play.

“Maintenance is an issue because every so often, Google and Apple change guidelines. Users need to rebuild the app with the latest guidelines and republish the app. Features for security and data compliance are also built into the platform. Every year, we do a vulnerability assessment,” explained Abhinav Girdhar, chief executive officer (CEO) of Appy Pie.

Sirohi is one of the 10 million registered users of Appy Pi whose customers include universities, research firms and even media companies. ICFAI Business School, Asianet, and ManipalCigna Health Insurance are some of the organizations in India that have built apps using Appy Pie’s no-code platform.

No-code is aimed at users who want to build apps but lack the ability to manually write code. But there are other tech-savvy individuals and professionals in startups and medium-sized businesses who know how to code but don’t have the time to build apps or technology platforms. Such people can use ‘low-code’ platforms where minimum coding is involved.

Kissflow’s low-code platform, for example, is being used by a number of startups and large enterprises, including local companies such as Zomato, Caratlane and Reliance Nippon Life Insurance Company, and global companies including Domino’s Pizza and PepsiCo.

Apart from individuals, startups and enterprises, low-code and no-code (LCNC) platforms are also being used by governments. ServicePlus, an electronic service delivery framework of the Government of India, is built on the LCNC platform. Developed by the National Informatics Centre, it has been adopted by 33 states and union territories. Its website states that there are over 2,300 e-services available, with lakhs of applications received, processed and delivered every month.

Data from research firms and industry bodies underline its rapid adoption. Research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that LCNC platforms will be used in more than 65% of application development worldwide by next year. According to TeamLease Digital, a professional services platform, the global LCNC development platform market is set to generate $187 billion in revenue by 2030 and account for over 65% of all application development activity. There are already 150 LCNC startups in India, most of which are bootstrapped. According to industry body Nasscom, the LCNC market generated around $400 million in India in FY2011. India has the potential to generate a little over $4 billion in revenue within two years, which would account for 10% of the global market.

cost factor

There are two types of LCNC platforms: one is on-premises and the other is cloud. Many LC platforms charge for the number of apps, the number of users, and consumption. Appy Pie, for example, charges since 699 1,599 per month for basic services. If app downloads exceed 2,000, additional charges are levied.

On Kissflow, a startup would spend $4,000 per month for an app with 100 users, said Kaushik Roy, head of India sales at the company. “Adoption depends on the customer. They start with no-code, and move to low-code as the number of processes and workflows increase. BFSI (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance) requires a lot of approval. We have seen a 50-60% adoption rate of low-code in BFSI. In manufacturing and retail, the adoption rate has been 30-40%,” informed Roy.

game changer

Let’s see what it has in store for enterprises and startups.

According to a September report by TeamLease Digital, traditional development requires a dedicated team of software developers with strong programming skills. However, the LCNC platform requires minimal programming skills. Any user can develop customized apps. Most routine development can be done with LCNCs, reducing the need for bulky IT teams, speeding up business application development and providing round-the-clock availability, experts said. LCNC is believed by many to be a “game changer” for the tech industry, indeed startups.

“Startups use the LCNC platform to reach the minimum viable product (MVP) stage when they are testing a new idea. They build an MVP, pitch it to venture capitalists for funding LCNC is good for demos and proof of concepts,” said Sandeep Kaul, co-founder and head of product at WhozBuying, a startup that has built two LC platforms.

Enterprises, especially BFSI companies, are probably more eager to partner with tech giants rather than smaller LCNC companies.

“We are seeing a growing demand for low-code solutions across sectors and industries, with BFSI and retail being the key ones,” said Charu Singh, country head, business applications, Microsoft India.

For example, when Piramal Capital & Housing Finance Ltd. wanted to set up a centralized loan origination and management system, it approached Microsoft to help build the low-code infrastructure, Singh said.

HDFC Bank this month said it would use Microsoft’s LCNC capabilities to set up an App Innovation and Automation Factory to help it migrate, modernize and transform its application portfolio. It aims to be the bank of the future. At the heart of this is our ability to provide our customers with an innovative banking experience that is second to none. We are investing in proprietary intellectual property as well as through such collaborations,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, group head of information technology and chief information officer, HDFC Bank.

Low-code platforms are being used by some companies to migrate legacy applications that are heavy and built in older programming languages. Kaushik Roy said that for this, they can be quickly taken to lightweight applications with platforms with less code.

Meanwhile, low-code platforms work in tandem with other solutions. For example, one can build an app on a low-code platform and integrate it with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

ai play

Most LCNC platforms allow the development and deployment of powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. Furthermore, unlike traditional AI app development that takes six to 12 months, no-code AI platforms can facilitate development, testing, and deployment in a matter of days or weeks. It reduces time to market products and services.

“I built a working demo of an app using Flutterflow in 2 hours and got a great deal. He asked for some changes and I quickly did so in front of him,” Ganesh SP, a senior engineering associate at Australian software company Atlassian, said in a January 15 tweet. Flutterflow is a low-code app building platform.

AI-based code assistants—such as Microsoft GitHub Copilot, OpenAI ChatGPT, and Amazon Code Whisperer—offer a new approach to empowering both non-technical users and programmers, according to Kashyap Kompela, AI analyst and chief executive of industry research firm RPA2AI. We do.

Code assistants are code writing solutions. They use natural language processing (NLP) models trained on billions of lines of open source code. Assistants can understand both the programming language and the human language (English), which enables them to make suggestions on the next line of code.

Kompela believes that the same technology that has developed “powerful pre-trained generative AI models such as DAL-E for images, GPT-3 for content, and ChatGPT for content creation in chat interfaces” Can also be used. Generate working code for user interfaces, mobile apps, and websites in various programming languages ​​when trained on a large dataset of coding samples. As the many early ChatGPT examples show, it can be used to debug code. Can also be done for”.

Developers redundant?

Automation can kill jobs. Will LCNC Platforms Make Developers Redundant?

Not necessary. LCNC platforms do not herald the demise of developers as there will always be a high demand for skilled programmers who can customize software. Furthermore, the LCNC frameworks themselves are built on real coding languages ​​- such as PHP, Python, and Java.

In fact, TeamLease sees an increasing demand for digital talent. “With the digital transformation across industries, the demand for specialized skills such as LCNC has created new opportunities for budding developers,” said a report by the company. This will create new jobs in India for non-traditional coders. “Already started making its place in IT world and there is no stopping it”.

interval

To be sure, LCNC has its limitations. According to a March 2022 report by Nasscom, most LCNC platforms are more suited to large enterprises rather than small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The report states that lack of training on the use of LCNC solutions and data security concerns are major barriers to adoption.

NASSCOM believes that IT services companies will continue to lead LCNC adoption in large enterprises. They will be consulting, systems integration (SI) and implementation partners for large LCNC providers. On the other hand, adoption by small businesses will continue to be dominated by direct partnerships with smaller LCNC providers who offer “better pricing and more customizable solutions.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and principal analyst at Greyhound Research, believes that while most companies claim to be civilian development platforms (for business users with no technical skill sets), in real life, this is far from the reality. “While SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are attempting to embed these platforms as part of their core offerings, adoption is still primarily limited to IT teams. Current use of these platforms is limited to basic tasks and functions. is limited and is not currently used to build end-to-end applications such as CRM and others,” he said.

Sandeep Kaul of Whoozbuying warns that it is important to have control over intellectual property, “which is a Git repository or a bit of code of an app”. To enhance the app and expand its features, users need the source code. “But the disadvantage of using one of these low-code platforms is that the users who build the app don’t have access to the code,” he said. They should consider platforms that allow them to keep the code whenever they want.

If LCNC platforms find a way to circumvent such limitations, the way forward could be easier for individuals and businesses looking to build apps rapidly.