MIT App Inventor

MIT App Inventor
Original author(s)Hal Abelson, Mark Friedman
Developer(s)Google, MIT Media Lab, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Initial releaseDecember 15, 2010; 13 years ago (2010-12-15)
Stable release
nb194c / September 14, 2023; 14 months ago (2023-09-14)
Repositorygithub.com/mit-cml/appinventor-sources
Written inJava, Swift, Objective-C, Kawa, Scheme, JavaScript, HTML
Operating systemAndroid, iOS
Available in19 languages
List of languages
English, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Polish
TypeApplication software development IDE
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 Unported, Apache 2.0
Websiteappinventor.mit.edu

MIT App Inventor (App Inventor or MIT AI2) is a high-level block-based visual programming language, originally built by Google and now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It allows newcomers to create computer applications for two operating systems: Android and iOS, which, as of 25 September 2023, is in beta testing. It is free and open-source released under dual licensing: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license and an Apache License 2.0 for the source code. Its target is primarily children and students studying computer programming, similar to Scratch.

The web interface consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) very similar to Scratch and StarLogo, allowing users to drag-and-drop visual objects to create an application that can be tested on Android and iOS devices and compiled to run as an Android app. It uses a companion mobile app named MIT AI2 Companion providing live testing and debugging.

App Inventor provides integration with different online services, such as Google Sheets and Firebase.

When creating App Inventor, Google drew upon significant prior research in educational computing, and work done within Google on online development environments.[1]

  1. ^ Hardesty, Larry (August 19, 2010). "The MIT roots of Google's new software". MIT News Office.