Google and MIT open source App Inventor for Android

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) open sourced the App Inventor for Android software toolset.

App Inventor was started as a project between Google and MIT to create a modular, easy to use integrated development environment to build Android applications. Now the pair have announced the first open source release of App Inventor.

On MIT's App Inventor web site the developers said it won't be accepting contributions to the released code at the moment, however that will change. The MIT team said the reason for this was its "hope to nurture a robust and active open-source project [...] but for now we don't want to distract the MIT developers from their efforts to complete and deploy the large-scale public server. In the meantime, we'll update the code periodically to match what's running at the latest MIT experimental system."

Google had decided to shut down its App Inventor service as part of its recent service cull, however the MIT team has reinstated its plans to develop the application and the service. By open sourcing the code and allowing others to use the App Inventor name and logo, the MIT team has left ample room for others to benefit from Google's and MIT's foundation work.

MIT's App Inventor for Android is a way for people to develop Android applications without prior knowledge of programming. It provides a web-based interface for designing Android apps without the need to get into Java programming with the Android software development kit.

MIT open sourcing App Inventor for Android could lead to other educational institutions using it as a base to build similar applications, helping students get interested in Android applications development. µ