With the release of Google App Inventor, Google will be opening up it’s Android platform to non-developers with a friendly WYSIWYG-like tool that allows people to create applications without writing code. Apparently, Google has been testing this tool in school and kids are pumping out real, working Android applications!

I love the spirt of this, and can see how Google wants to promote their platform, and get people excited about creating applications for their app store – going right up against Apple.

The comparisons?

Apple iPhone

• closed environment
• app approval process for getting applications into it’s Store
• arguably complex programming language (Cocoa) – not trivial to learn to develop for (even for seasoned programmers)

Google Android

• open environment
• no app approval process for app store
• Android is based on Java – possibly the most popular programming language in the world

So, basically complete opposite approaches. There’s a lot more to say here, but this is the high level comparison and certainly paints an interesting picture.

Which is better?

While I love the sprit of Google’s open-ness, and I tend to disagree the closed approaches that Apple follows, I do worry about t over-saturation and dilution that could happen in the Google world – particularly now when anyone with an “App Inventor Kit” can throw together any app and give it away to the world. Again, the openness is cool, but it does come at a cost: quality. This is something Apple, with all their rigidness, refuses to let go of – and for good reason.

Perhaps, in the end, it could play out similar to how it happened in the 80s: Apple comes out first, with an amazing, inspiring product (the Mac), but refuses to open it up (in that case, refusing to allow the software to run on other hardware). Microsoft came along and created a cheaper product (Windows) that could run on any (lower cost) hardware, and they owned the market. As they say: “only time will tell.” With such totally opposite approaches to challenges that have already played-out in history, you’d think there’d be some kind of “magical” middle road to chose from.