Google is pulling the plug on its App Maker low code development platform, barely 18 months after officially launching it as part of G Suite.

App Maker allowed G Suite customers to assemble applications to automate or simplify business processes centred on data from other applications in Google’s suite, without having to get their fingers dirty with Git or security or infrastructure.

The platform’s brief life span as a fully fledged Google product was pretty much exactly the same amount of time it spent under the vendor’s early adopter programme.

Its demise was presumably already on the cards when Google bought up five year old no-code platform AppSheet earlier this month.

At the time, Google Cloud’s VP of business application development, Amit Zavery, said its new acquisition fed into “Google Cloud’s strategy to reimagine the application development space with a platform that helps enterprises innovate with no-code development, workflow automation, application integration and API management as they modernize their business processes in the cloud.”

That Google already had its own no-code development platform appeared to have completely slipped Zavery’s mind at the time of the AppSheet buy. Though in fairness, not many journalists remembered it at the time either.

App Maker users have been warned that the service will shut down completely on January 19, 2021.

Existing apps will continue to work until next year, but no new apps can be created as of April 15 this year. Data associated with apps and stored in Cloud SQL will remain unchanged.

Google is not simply shifting customers onto AppSheet, saying “Your app can’t be directly migrated to another platform”. Rather it is recommending its new buy to customers who “use App Maker to automate complex business processes.”

If customers use App Maker to actually develop Apps, it is recommending Google App Engine, while customers using it for data collection are pointed towards Google Forms.