MIT App Inventor is an open source (Apache Software License 2.0) platform for anyone to build their own mobile apps. The MIT App Inventor project seeks to democratize software development by empowering all people, especially young people, to move from technology consumption to technology creation. Currently it targets Android with an iOS version in the works, and is used by over one million people worldwide every year. Recently, we introduced a suite of on-device machine learning extensions to allow people to learn about training and evaluating custom ML models without sending data to any third parties.

MIT App Inventor in 2021

In the last year we have implemented support for dictionaries in the App Inventor language. We have introduced support for newer Android APIs. These facilities make it easier to interoperate with JSON and XML data. We are also developing a feature called Visible Component Extensions, which will allow any developer to extend App Inventor's capabilities with custom views. We also recently introduced a suite of on-device machine learning extensions to allow people to learn about training and evaluating custom ML models without sending data to any third parties and have produced curricula for teachers to use to teach about artificial intelligence (http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/ai-with-mit-app-inventor). These materials are freely available for anyone to use under the CC 4.0 BY-SA license. In 2020 we introduced improved support for using App Inventor for mobile development on Chromebooks. New this year is also a translation into Lithuanian.