Google App Inventor for Android Finds A New Home with MIT Center for Mobile Learning
As Google continues to consolidate its services in 2011, it shut down a number of projects under its umbrella including Google Labs. Under the supervision of Google Labs was the popular Google App Inventor for Android. The program allowed non-developers to quickly prototype mobile app ideas using web-based graphical programming tools.
After Google Labs was shut down Google has since open sourced the code for the App Inventor. This led to the App Inventor finding a new and exciting home with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Reportedly, Google will be sending seed funds to the MIT Media Lab to continue on with the project. MIT has created a new Center for Mobile Learning, which will house the project.
This comes as an enormous relief to fans of the App Inventor, as its fate was previously unclear. We’ve included the latest update from Google below,
Dear App Inventor User,
As a result of the recent changes to Google Labs and App Inventor, effective immediately, the URL for App Inventor will change from appinventor.googlelabs.com to appinventorbeta.com. This URL change WILL NOT have an impact on your projects stored in App Inventor. All data that you see in your appinventor.googlelabs.com account, as well as documentation and email forums will be available at appinventorbeta.com.
As we announced on the App Inventor Announcement Forum, Google will end support for App Inventor and open source the code base at the end of this year. Additionally, in order to ensure the future success of App Inventor, Google has funded the establishment of a Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab, where MIT will be actively engaged in studying and extending App Inventor. This transition will happen at the end of 2011. At that time you will need to download your data from appinventorbeta.com in order to continue working with it in the open source instance of App Inventor. In the coming months we will send you detailed instructions on how to download your data.
Please visit the App Inventor user forums to get future updates on App Inventor.
The App Inventor Team
