Google's App Inventor Challenges Apple

Google's new App Inventor, a one-stop tool for creating mobile apps for Android devices, must make Steve Jobs a mite concerned. It’s a clear challenge to Apple for the lion’s share of the burgeoning mobile market.

Google's Android platform has been gaining on Apple's U.S. mobile market share due in large part to the messaging around quality in Droid advertising.

By muscling in on Apple's dominance in the apps marketplace, it's hitting Jobs where it hurts: in the hottest growth area that drives sales of iPads and iPhones.

"The App Store used to be Apple's crown jewel, as it made mobile content on the iPhone more accessible than it ever had been before. Developers used to develop only for it, and it grew quickly as a result. It's still growing, but the Android Market is now almost half the size, having grown from 2,300 apps in March 2009 to more than 100,000 this month," comments Bryson Meunier, associate director of SEO at Omnicom's Resolution Media, to MediaPost.

App Inventor is specifically geared to non-programmers as an enabling tool to transform them into developers. As detailed on its website, “To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.”

Google has been beta-testing the app at in academic settings including the University of San Francisco, as shown below. The new tool will increase AdMob inventory and give Google "control of the entire ecosystem, including data -- similar to the world Apple built."

Amielle Lake, CEO of Tagga Media, told MediaPost, "Low-value inventory increased supply, bringing down prices. Agencies and brands learned from that experience, which is why they demand transparency in media buys these days, so their ad only runs on the sites where they pay remnant prices, or agree to run remnant inventory."