What is Amazon Honeycode?

A “Light-weight” tool to develop web apps and mobile apps without being a developer.

Though the one-line sub-title may have given you a rough idea of “What is Amazon Honeycode”, but let us explore this in details. So as the name suggests this tool is developed and maintained by Amazon or more precisely Amazon Web Service(AWS). The ideas behind developing this tool were mainly:

1. It is very difficult for a small company to get hold of a professional developer who would develop a web or mobile application to manage the company’s workflow.
2. All company need to maintain some sort of database in the form of a spreadsheet but it become very difficult to work collaboratively on such spreadsheet and sharing the database among the employees is also a very cumbersome process. This problem can be solved if there exists an application to maintain the database.

Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, stated in a tweet:

How many apps never get built b/c people don’t have programming skills or the technology team is too busy to get your app? A lot. This is what our new #AWS service, Amazon Honeycode, intends to address. Makes everybody a #builder.

Amazon Honeycode is currently in beta.

Amazon Honeycode resembles the familiar interface of spreadsheet combined with the data management capability of the database. Users can use the visual application builder interface to create interactive web and mobile application with the support of AWS-built database which tracks the changes from time to time, notify users of the changes, etc.

Amazon Honeycode is made primarily for the non-professional developers, who are the end-users. According to Amazon, it is a very light-weight tool which can be used by anyone without any knowledge in coding.

According to some Honeycode is very light-weight functionally compared to Microsoft’s Power Apps, which was released in 2016 and Google Cloud's AppSheet.

Amazon Honeycode currently has limited reach in terms of cloud regions, thought AWS assured that they will be expanding to the additional region soon. Currently Honeycode three price plans:

For those who are wondering what does rows means —

A range of data that runs horizontally across a table. In Honeycode, tables hold the data that power apps.

Sharing of these datasheets has been made easier through the introduction of iOS and Andriod versions of Amazon Honeycode.

Amazon also provides great documentation along with extensive video tutorials to get started with Honeycode. Honeycode also provides a few pre-built templates that will make the app making the process much easier.

Check out Honeycode official site: https://www.honeycode.aws. Visit the site to build your first Honeycode app. Honeycode community can be very useful.