MIT News

The MIT App Inventor is the basis for more than 3 million projects, and its second iteration was released late last year in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week. The App Inventor is a joint effort of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and it enables anyone to construct an Android phone app using a Web browser and either a connected phone or an emulator. "It's huge for anyone with a smartphone who has wanted to use some app but has not been able to find it," notes the MIT Center for Mobile Learning's Josh Sheldon. App Inventor 2 trumps the previous version by being completely operable from the browser, and no longer requiring users to install and run a Java file. Whereas App Inventor 1 currently has 1.3 million users who have built 3.2 million apps with it, App Inventor 2 has 100,000 users who have built 140,000 apps, according to the Center for Mobile Learning's Hal Abelson. To read further, please visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/app-inventor-launches-second-iteration.html.