On the Internet, we saw a lot of 'personal home pages' which were basically globally accessible bookmark menus.
Those had limited utility because they were public and only available when on-line.
By comparison something as 'easy' as Frontpage would be great for making a personal single-purpose app for your phone. It doesn't have to do a great deal to be useful - perhaps it would just show the RSS feed from your school events society. Maybe it would just make a ping sound when you touched the screen, or be a really simple game just for the fun of it.
If we are talking about 15 minutes of setup and build time then the apps really don't have to do much, and they only have to be useful to one person to get made. But it makes owning the phone much more interesting to people who are a bit geeky but don't code, which is important for Google.
(Compare to the iPhone - where the easiest option is to set up a web server and build a single-purpose web site. That's easy for us but for a 10 year old it's a huge barrier.)
On the Internet, we saw a lot of 'personal home pages' which were basically globally accessible bookmark menus.
Those had limited utility because they were public and only available when on-line.
By comparison something as 'easy' as Frontpage would be great for making a personal single-purpose app for your phone. It doesn't have to do a great deal to be useful - perhaps it would just show the RSS feed from your school events society. Maybe it would just make a ping sound when you touched the screen, or be a really simple game just for the fun of it.
If we are talking about 15 minutes of setup and build time then the apps really don't have to do much, and they only have to be useful to one person to get made. But it makes owning the phone much more interesting to people who are a bit geeky but don't code, which is important for Google.
(Compare to the iPhone - where the easiest option is to set up a web server and build a single-purpose web site. That's easy for us but for a 10 year old it's a huge barrier.)