In AppSheet as it stands today, building screens (Views) is not a matter of the developer designing the details themselves. Instead, you choose from a set of ready-made templates such as Map View or Card View.
This has a downside — developers cannot fine-tune the look of their screens — but it has also been an advantage: screen creation can be completed in the absolute minimum amount of time. Precisely because building screens takes so little effort, developers can concentrate on the logic behind the scenes.
That advantage, however, may now need a qualifier: “up until the arrival of generative AI.”
Today, generative AI can produce a beautifully designed interface in minutes, or even seconds. AI appears to be very good at creating this kind of visual design by writing code such as HTML and CSS.
But I am absolutely not asking for that “build-the-screen-with-code” approach to be brought into AppSheet as-is. For citizen developers who are not engineers, AI vibe coding may make things easy to create, but understanding that output — and then maintaining, managing, and modifying it — is very nearly impossible.
What I would like to propose instead is not screen creation through coding, but screen composition through object placement.
The mental image is something like Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) or Microsoft Power Apps, where you place the columns belonging to each table onto the screen as objects. I am not asking you to replicate the specifications of any particular product. I simply want to convey the underlying idea: that the developer assembles a screen by arranging “UI objects.”
If a human were to build screens manually using this “object placement” method, it would take a considerable amount of time and effort. To repeat what I said earlier, I believe AppSheet’s current philosophy of screen building was a groundbreaking way to reduce that effort to the bare minimum.
Going forward, though, we can simply have AI do this “object placement” for us. AI arranges and designs the screen to a reasonable standard of quality, and the human fine-tunes it where necessary. With this approach, no knowledge of code is required, and it is still possible to maintain, manage, and modify what the AI has produced.
One more point: responsive support — one of AppSheet’s real strengths today, where the layout automatically adapts to the device in use, whether smartphone, tablet, or desktop browser — is something I would very much like to see carried over into this new screen method as well. Data Studio has become responsive too, so that level would be entirely sufficient.
Finally, since the current UI is perfectly adequate in many cases, I think it would be even more practical if we could choose between the “existing Views (predefined templates)” and the “object placement method.”
This is a fairly different direction from the current UI philosophy, but I would be grateful if you would consider it.
