Amazon’s New Cloud Service Makes It Easier to Build Mobile Apps

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is inviting not-so-tech-savvy customers to use its cloud.

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday released Amazon Honeycode, which lets businesses build web and mobile applications without diving into computer programming languages. Technology companies have invested in low-code or no-code in recent years as a workaround for customers that want to give employees the ability to make use of software tools without monopolizing the time of expensive, in-demand engineers.

Amazon’s chief rivals in the business of selling rented processing power and software services, Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have similar services. Honeycode, dubbed “AWS for Everyone” in the LinkedIn profiles of various Amazon engineers, has been rumored for more than a year.

AWS said potential uses for Honeycode include process approvals, event scheduling and inventory tracking. The service is available for customers of Amazon’s U.S. West (Oregon) data center region beginning on Wednesday, with more widespread geographic availability coming soon.

Amazon said messaging software builder Slack Technologies Inc. is among the customers planning to use Honeycode. AWS and Slack announced an alliance earlier this month that has both companies making wider use of each others’ tools.