Last week we heard the news that Google’s Android App Inventor was to be shut down. Speculation is that this is due in part to newly appointed CEO Larry Page’s desire to focus the company’s efforts. Of note, App Inventor isn’t the only product affected by this. The entirety of Google Labs is also “being phased out”. This is a significant loss for Android, as the Labs were directly responsible for mobile products we love like Google Goggles, Gesture Search, and Sky Map. What innovative new products might we now miss out on? Luckily the products mentioned above will continue to exist, but other Android Lab projects like BreadCrumb won’t be so lucky. It seemed at first as if App Inventor was also on that “do not recuscitate” list. Thankfully, however, Google announced that they would open source the project to whoever was willing to pick it up. Enter MIT. MIT has come up with a new Center for Mobile Learning to be housed in the famed MIT Media Lab. There, an open-sourced App Inventor will begin again in the hands of its original creator Hal Abelson as well as fellow MIT professors Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. By this partnership, App Inventor will likely be re-released under a dual Google/MIT license.
Below is an excerpt from Hal Abelson, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT:
App Inventor for Android—a programming system that makes it easy for learners to create mobile apps for Android smartphones—currently supports a community of about 100,000 educators, students and hobbyists. Through the new initiatives at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning, App Inventor will be connected to MIT’s premier research in educational technology and MIT’s long track record of creating and supporting open software.
Google first launched App Inventor internally in order to move it forward with speed and focus, and then developed it to a point where it started to gain critical mass. Now, its impact can be amplified by collaboration with a top academic institution. At MIT, App Inventor will adopt an enriched research agenda with increased opportunities to influence the educational community. In a way, App Inventor has now come full circle, as I actually initiated App Inventor at Google by proposing it as a project during my sabbatical with the company in 2008. The core code for App Inventor came from Eric Klopfer’s lab, and the inspiration came from Mitch Resnick’s Scratch Project. The new center is a perfect example of how industry and academia can collaborate effectively to create change enabled by technology, and we look forward to seeing what we can do next, together.
Hopefully, now App Inventor will receive the attention it needs from its creators and contributors everywhere to become an invaluable educational resource for budding programmers.
[via tc]