The founding of the iPhone App Store set off an earthquake in the tech world. Suddenly, the humble cellphone could be just about anything  a game, a store, a musical instrument, a strobe, a pet, a database, a medical tool. A new portable-computing era was born, along with a thriving tech economy.

Last month, Google promised to shift the tech landscape again with Android App Inventor. It’s a software kit that’s supposed to let average people, not just programmers, create their own apps for the growing number of phone models that use Google’s Android software.

“You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor,” says Google in its announcement. “You do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

Do-it-yourself software? You just drag building blocks around? That would change everything. No wonder this tech-news item made headlines even in general-interest newspapers like this one.