Historically, building an app required a close understanding of the complexity of writing code. Thanks to AI, those days are over.
Google has announced Opal, an experimental tool for Google Labs. This allows developers to create apps on Thursdays using natural language prompts and interactive visual aids. Opal leverages Google's unique suite of AI models to enable users to create a variety of visual assets for their apps. Gemini 2.5 can help you copy, for example, in writing blog posts. For example, Veo 3 and Imagen 4 can generate accompanying video (including audio) or images, respectively.
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“We want to provide products that offer more control and transparency over the combination of all the features of our Google model without having to code,” Elle Zadina, the company's product manager, said in an online demo video.
This feature offers a gallery of ready-made app templates, each with its own aesthetic, similar to those offered on website building platforms such as Wix and Squarespace. It is also tailored to a variety of creative needs. For example, you can build an immersive virtual game, and you can tailor another game to generate video ads for a particular audience.
You can also start from scratch by clicking on the New window above the template gallery. This leads you to a simple prompt window, and in natural language you can provide a rough overview of the functions you want to run your app. The instructions are translated into an illustrated workflow organized by input (what you requested), generation steps (the specific steps the model takes to design the app), and output (the final amalgamate product).
Each step appears as a separate box. You can click this to see the specific actions your model is using, or you can add your own edits directly. There is also a “Share App” option at the forefront corner of the Opal screen. This allows you to switch your app from private to public and share the URL with someone with a Google account. Opal is now available to public beta users. You can access it here.
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This release comes a day after Microsoft owned Github launched Spark, a similar app building platform, in a popular preview. These systems are part of a broad trend towards “low code” and “no code” tools across the high-tech industry, leveraging AI to automate many of the key steps in the software development process.
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