Thing is, and this differs per market; most companies do not need anything more than endless streams of crud apps, and that is where these tools shine. You (and many of HN) might work in the b2c market, but where I work, people do not care much about how things look or ux; they care if they work just a little better than the sap or oracle interfaces they had before. Actually, this goes for many (most?) b2c products as well; most (traditional; challenger banks are a lot better) banking or airline apps I know look like bad template barf-ups (many are indeed that, bought from the same cooking cutting companies) and yet people use them. Would it be better if they were custom designed with money spent on actual ux and design? Sure, but apparently not enough to matter to the company commissioning it.
When companies I work with look for no/low code, the only reason they will not use it is vendor lock in; if they cannot run on premise and/or ‘eject’ the code, they will not use it. Several products allow this and they are fairly popular (so much in fact that they cannot find enough ‘devs’ for their clients).
These systems have their place; it is just (much) faster (some boring things in regular environments are just a few clicks with these tools) for some x% of applications while another y% you cannot do with them or is very difficult; I would still do the x% in such a tool as thinking ‘we might need x+y later on’ is premature usually and in my experience does not pan out. We have programmed applications ‘created for expansion’ 15-20 years ago that run to this day which would have fit in the x%; aka we wasted time and money while the expansion was never realised by the client.
Edit;
> it would imply the supply of apps competing for that category would explode.
And that is a very consumer centric approach; we are not all making fitness apps or something; these apps would all look (more or less) the same but work on different APIs and data; that is fine for almost everything; not only some internal stuff. It helps companies a great deal to just have something their clients can use vs nothing, even if the cost is close to zero; and they cannot be the same as they talk with different systems and different data. Even creating partner dashboards more efficiently than slinging code is something people do all the time and you cannot ‘just copy paste that’ to another company.
These products are not generally meant to build ‘the next whatsapp’. But you can prototype it with them and show investors; I agree with you there though; wrong tool for the job.
What nocode tools don't have lock-in? The ones I know which are open source still have these proprietary add-ons for important stuff like authentication or connecting to other systems.
IME at least 20% of the needs of these companies are not met by "basic CRUD app programming" which is why these no-code things never really take off despite often appearing quite impressive. 80% is not enough.
Basic CRUD also implies an understanding of domain modeling and normalized relational db design. In practice these are uncommon enough skills among developers never mind users of tools like these. That's half the reason why spreadsheets business users want turned into apps are so horrendous - it's not even intrinsically a problem with excel, it's just that the relationships between the domain objects are usually confused and the data is in a mess.
And you are of course right in that this will only create 80% of what the customer needs. But the marginal cost for us to create those first 80% of the application were almost zero. And since we weren't worse than anyone else with the last 20% we could deliver fast, inexpensive and still have large margins.
The mistake I think many do when they think "no code" is that they think that they can eliminate the developer and let business people just "configure" the new application. But those people have the insulting idea that the only thing that makes programming hard is syntax.
Exactly. No-where did I mention you do not need (good) devs for this. They are just not writing code (in the traditional way). No/lowcode is not saying the same as end-user development, although it gets mixes up quite a bit (also by the companies selling the tools), it is not what I mean when when working with such tools.
And in my experience at least, you can push back closer to the 80% than the 100%, so sure, you don't get that last 20% (or part of it) but maybe I can convince the client they don't need it. And if they do, I would choose (maybe) another tool for the job like I said.
I think there will always be a random form function that captivates (today’s ticktok), but my prediction is that the web will be won less by competing on form factor, and rather won focused on other parts of the user experience.
In a simple example, logistics is an obvious differentiator, 2 day vs 5 day shipping etc.
There are so many dimensions to compete on and app design will contribute to many of those dimensions, but some ways to compete will not involve coding.