Android: MIT to release public App Inventor service by April

by Michaela Hebein

26.01.2012 09:25

The Google App Inventor allows creating Android apps without the need for coding knowledge. Set free by Google, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took over - and plans to release the MIT Public App Inventor Service by April. If you want to use it now already, you can set up your own server using JAR files provided by MIT.

The Google App Inventor is what some call "plug and play Android app development". You basically don't need coding knowledge to create an app using it. The tool was developed at Google Labs, a project which is phased out by Google little by little. The Inventor, as a rather popular tool, was searching for a new home - and it found one at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning (CML).

The CML has now announced it is on track for releasing the MIT Public App Inventor Service in the first quarter of this year.

"While unexpected issues can always arise, we're guardedly optimistic that people who plan to run App Inventor courses or workshops can anticipate being able to use the MIT service by mid-April."

Open, but temporarily closed

To get this process done properly, the CML won't be accepting - at this point of time - contributions to the source code just released by Google, but they will "update the code periodically to match what's running at the latest MIT experimental system."

Your own App Inventor server

If you don't feel like waiting, you can use MIT's Java Archive (JAR) distribution to set up your own small-scale App Inventor services. It is widely used, e.g. by university classes for non-programmers, as you can see in the video underneath.

Video: App Inventor Course at the University of San Francisco (USF)

Old Inventor projects back-up

Something else you might like to hear: Those who forgot to download their projects in order to preserve them after the shutdown of the Google service, might find them in a zip file put together by the Google team as a courtesy.

Android Developers, what do you think?

Those of you who do (proper) Android development, what do you think about the App Inventor? Does it produce good quality apps? What does it lack? Do you maybe use it yourself sometimes?