App Inventor for Android is Now Open Source

Android App Inventor has been phased out by Google some weeks ago. But it is not dead yet, as Google made it open source and it is hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The developers of App Inventor said they won’t be accepting contributions to the source code for now, but they plan to accept other developers contribution once the project is “complete and deployed to a large-scale public server”.

App Inventor is a tool that allows non-programmer to design applications for Android via a web-based interface for designing Android apps without the need to get into Java programming with the Android software development kit.

The projct is being transfered between Google and MIT, and you won’t be able to use App Inventor at the moment. MIT anticipates the public instance of App Inventor will be available for the general public to access some time in the first quarter of 2012.

However, MIT is providing experimental Java Archive (JAR) files that experienced programmers can use to set up a private instance of App Inventor on Google App Engine, for use by small groups. If you want to run App Inventor on GAE, check out MIT App Inventor Developer’s Blog and the JAR file users group.

The new home for App Inventor is located at http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.