At the recent re:Invent AWS announced Amplify Studio, a new Figma-connected low-code service meant to help developers quickly build cloud-connected apps. The new tool is an extension of the existing AWS Amplify service, which focuses on building web and mobile apps but lacks the easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface of Amplify.
Amplify Studio is a low-code environment where developers start with a data model, add content and authentication, and build a user experience using Figma, a third-party collaborative design tool. It replaces an earlier product called Amplify Admin UI released a year ago.
In a Front-End Web and Mobile blog post on Amplify Studio, Rene Brandel, senior product manager at AWS Amplify, stated that for configuring and managing backends, Amplify Admin UI's existing capabilities (such as "data," "authentication," "storage," and more) will be part of Amplify Studio going forward, providing a unified interface to enable developers to build full-stack apps faster.
According to a blog post from Ali Spittel, lead developer advocacy at AWS Amplify, the benefit of Amplify Studio is that developers can focus on the core business logic that makes their app different rather than spending tons of time going back-and-forth on UI styling. In addition, the brand new Amplify UI library is also in preview, including components such as newsfeeds, contact forms, e-commerce cards, and primitives such as Buttons, TextFields, and Alerts, which enhances developer productivity.
Furthermore, Spittel said in a tweet:
Here’s the thing that’s different about @AWSAmplify studio: the "low code" is developer-first. It creates real; human-readable React components that you can extend yourself.
In addition, a respondent on a Hacker News thread around Amplify Studio stated:
I think Amplify has a real future as an alternative universe way of working with AWS for app building. I could see this studio launch being a quick way to prototype/iterate/experiment with designs before giving feedback back to a design team.
With Amplify Studio, AWS releases a second platform requiring almost no code for mobile and web applications next to Amazon Honeycode, released in beta last year. However, Amazon is a latecomer with its low- and no-code offerings. In 2015 Microsoft introduced PowerApps, a part of the later branded Power Platform, to allow power-users or "citizen" developers to build custom applications solving business problems. Furthermore, in January 2020, Google acquired AppSheet, a start-up with no-code application-development tools. Each of them and several vendors like Salesforce, Mendix, and Outsystems with their low-code and no-code offerings are in a market that Forrester predicts will grow by 50% a year to more than $21 billion by 2024.
Lastly, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Amplify is a significant development for AWS, as it has traditionally stayed away from the low code / no-code space. Given its long-term track record and the related perception of being a full code developer shop, it will have to show that it can cater to a different user base.
