App Inventor — An Application to Build One

Don’t ask Doremon for an app 😑

View on Github: Backend and Frontend

Being a Back-end Engineer, I often found myself unable to showcase the applications I build.
Honestly, I don’t prefer spending much time on the design (HTML + CSS). But I have an affinity for a good user experience.

The answer is always: “What If?”
That was precisely my thought; what if there was a mobile application to build simple applications (A mobile version of Retool?).

Let me give an example: Let’s say you built an application for face detection (Refer: Azure Face Detection).
An API takes an Image URL as an input, and returns face rectangle coordinates.

Building a mobile application would be better to showcase the project to the end-user, right? (Input: User takes a selfie or uploads an image. Output: Get coordinates of the face or an image with coordinates superimposed on the picture as a rectangular box).

Example: Build a simple application to generate a unique identifier.

The typical first step: Register/Login to the application and navigate to the dashboard.

Figure 1: Login/Registration

• Create a new application — application name and description.
• Create a new component (Submit Button in the below example).
• Configure the component to trigger an API (You can also use placeholders, which would be replaced by the data entered by the user — Reference)

Figure 2: Create an application with components — Generate UUID

If there are more components, toggle the eye-icon to re-order the components

Figure 3: Generate UUID Application Working

Adding an example of building a TODO application (JSON Placeholder):

Figure 4: Create JSON TODO Application

Figure 4: Update JSON TODO Application

That’s about it 🚀