The Quick Guide to Making Apps Without Code

The Basics: Introduction to Making Apps Without Code

Is making apps without code really the future of software?

No-code is a major buzzword in the tech world. It seems like every other week there’s a new no-code tool popping up which claims to make some process or another easier and faster. But what is no-code? Why should we care? And is it a passing fad or is it here to stay?

Airbnb’s primary business model is taking a service fee at the point of transaction. Airbnb typically charges the hosts 3% and guests 10-15%, though they’ve started rolling out fees just to hosts. In the end, it doesn’t make a huge difference in net fees, just in the psychology of who is paying for what. To simplify things, this guide will just outline a standard transaction fee at the point of purchase. Below is a quick guide on how to build a rental marketplace like Airbnb.

Background on No-Code App Development

It helps to start with describing the basics of how computers work. At the end of the day, computers understand 0s and 1s because transistors only have two states: on, when electricity is flowing (represented by 1s), and off (represented by 0s). But it takes a whole lot of 0s and 1s to convey even the simplest commands to a computer. Which is why over time we invented abstracted, more efficient ways to communicate with computers, including assembly languages, programming languages, and frameworks (which all eventually get converted into 0s and 1s). 

The latest iteration of this abstracted communication is no-code. This allows non-coders to tell a computer what to do not by writing expressions in the syntax of code on a black screen, but by drawing things and creating logical expressions. That’s a big deal for several reasons but the main one is that it becomes much quicker and easier to build something. Instead of writing dozens (or hundreds) of lines of code to accomplish a minor task, you just click a few times. As a result, building a custom product takes days or weeks instead of months or years.

Being able to build drastically faster means much lower development costs, further compounded by the fact that you don’t need expensive coders to build no-code software. The implications are massive: much cheaper/faster software projects, custom software being built for use cases that didn’t make sense before, and a new labor force of no-code developers.

At Airdev we’ve seen all of the effects of making apps without code ourselves through our clients and our developers and are confident in our prediction above. The one caveat we would make is that a lot of (maybe most) specific no-code tools won’t still be around in 10 years and new ones will emerge. But the way that people make most kinds of software will change drastically.