In June 2007, Apple unveiled the primary iPhone. But the corporate made a strategic decision about iPhone software: its recent App Store could be a walled garden. An iPhone user wouldn’t have the ability to put in applications that Apple itself hadn’t vetted, a minimum of not without breaking Apple’s terms of service.
That business decision, nonetheless, left educators out within the cold. They’d no option to bring mobile software development — about to grow to be a part of on a regular basis life — into the classroom. How could a young student code, futz with, and share apps in the event that they couldn’t get it into the App Store?
MIT professor Hal Abelson was on sabbatical at Google on the time, when the corporate was deciding the right way to reply to Apple’s gambit to corner the mobile hardware and software market. Abelson recognized the restrictions Apple was placing on young developers; Google recognized the market need for an open-source alternative operating system — what became Android. Each saw the chance that became App Inventor.
“Google began the Android project kind of in response to the iPhone,” Abelson says. “And I used to be there, taking a look at what we did at MIT with education-focused software like Logo and Scratch, and said ‘what a cool thing it might be if kids could make mobile apps also.’”
Google software engineer Mark Friedman volunteered to work with Abelson on what became “Young Android,” soon renamed Google App Inventor. Like Scratch, App Inventor is a block-based language, allowing programmers to visually snap together pre-made “blocks” of code moderately than have to learn specialized programming syntax.
Friedman describes it as novel for the time, particularly for mobile development, to make it as easy as possible to construct easy mobile apps. “That meant a web-based app,” he says, “where the whole lot was online and no external tools were required, with a straightforward programming model, drag-and-drop user interface designing, and blocks-based visual programming.” Thus an app someone programmed in an internet interface might be installed on an Android device.
App Inventor scratched an itch. Boosted by the explosion in smartphone adoption and the very fact App Inventor is free (and eventually open source), soon greater than 70,000 teachers were using it with tons of of 1000’s of scholars, with Google providing the backend infrastructure to maintain it going.
“I remember answering an issue from my manager at Google who asked what number of users I assumed we might get in the primary 12 months,” Friedman says. “I assumed it might be about 15,000 — and I remember pondering that may be too optimistic. I used to be ultimately off by an element of 10–20.” Friedman was quick to credit greater than their decisions in regards to the app. “I believe that it’s fair to say that while a few of that growth was on account of the standard of the tool, I do not think you’ll be able to discount the effect of it being from Google and of the effect of Hal Abelson’s repute and network.”
Some early apps took App Inventor in ambitious, unexpected directions, akin to “Discardious,” developed by teenage girls in Nigeria. Discardious helped business owners and individuals eliminate waste in communities where disposal was unreliable or too cumbersome.
But even before apps like Discardious got here along, the team knew Google’s support wouldn’t be open-ended. Nobody desired to cut teachers off from a tool they were thriving with, so around 2010, Google and Abelson agreed to transfer App Inventor to MIT. The transition meant major staff contributions to recreate App Inventor without Google’s proprietary software but MIT needing to work with Google to proceed to offer the network resources to maintain App Inventor free for the world.
With such a big user base, nonetheless, that left Abelson “apprehensive the entire thing was going to collapse” without Google’s direct participation.
Friedman agrees. “I might should say that I had my fears. App Inventor has a fairly complicated technical implementation, involving multiple programming languages, libraries and frameworks, and by the tip of its time at Google we had a team of about 10 people working on it.”
Yet not only did Google provide significant funding to help the transfer, but, Friedman says of the transfer’s ultimate success, “Hal could be in charge and he had fairly extensive knowledge of the system and, after all, had great passion for the vision and the product.”
MIT enterprise architect Jeffrey Schiller, who built the Institute’s computer network and have become its manager in 1984, was one other key part in sustaining App Inventor after its transition, helping introduce technical features fundamental to its accessibility and long-term success. He led the combination of the platform into web browsers, the addition of WiFi support moderately than needing to attach phones and computers via USB, and the laying of groundwork for technical support of older phones because, as Schiller says, “a lot of our users cannot rush out and buy the newest and costliest devices.”
These collaborations and contributions over time resulted in App Inventor’s best resource: its user base. Because it grew, and with support from community managers, volunteer know-how grew with it. Now, greater than a decade since its launch and 4 years after its overdue inclusion within the Apple App Store, App Inventor recently crossed several major milestones, probably the most remarkable being the creation of its 100 millionth project and registration of its 20 millionth user. Young developers proceed to make incredible applications, boosted now by some great benefits of AI. College students created “Brazilian XôDengue” as a way for users to make use of phone cameras to discover mosquito larvae that could be carrying the dengue virus. Highschool students recently developed “Calmify,” a journaling app that uses AI for emotion detection. And a mother in Kuwait wanted something to assist manage the often-overwhelming experience of recent motherhood when returning to work, so she built the chatbot “PAM (Personal Advisor to Moms)” as a non-judgmental space to speak through the challenges.
App Inventor’s long-term sustainability now rests with the App Inventor Foundation, created in 2022 to grow its resources and further drive its adoption. It’s led by executive director Natalie Lao.
In a letter to the App Inventor community, Lao highlighted the inspiration’s commitment to equitable access to educational resources, which for App Inventor required a rapid shift toward AI education — but in a way that upholds App Inventor’s core values to be “a free, open-source, easy-to-use platform” for mobile devices. “Our mission is to not only democratize access to technology,” Lao wrote, “but in addition foster a culture of innovation and digital literacy.”
Inside MIT, App Inventor today falls under the umbrella of the MIT RAISE Initiative — Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education, run by Dean for Digital Learning Cynthia Breazeal, Professor Eric Klopfer, and Abelson. Together they can integrate App Inventor into ever-broader communities, events, and funding streams, resulting in opportunities like this summer’s inaugural AI and Education Summit on July 24-26. The summit will include awards for winners of a Global AI Hackathon, whose roughly 180 submissions used App Inventor to create AI tools in two tracks: Climate & Sustainability and Health & Wellness. Tying together one other of RAISE’s major projects, participants were encouraged to attract from Day of AI curricula, including its newest courses on data science and climate change.
“Over the past 12 months, there’s been an infinite mushrooming in the probabilities for mobile apps through the combination of AI,” says Abelson. “The chance for App Inventor and MIT is to democratize those recent possibilities for young people — and for everybody — as an enhanced source of power and creativity.”
