App Inventor Kind-of Sort-of Being Kept Alive By Google Thanks to MIT Center Funding

We were saddened to hear news that Google’s App Inventor, what you could describe as a “WYSIWYG” app creator, would cease to be developed by Google. It wouldn’t completely disappear as Google agreed to open source the project in order to allow third parties to come in and continue work on it if they wanted.

That first third party appears to be the MIT Center for Mobile Learning, a special institute devoted to educating people on the booming mobile application development market and helping them get into mobile development.

How Google’s involved? They initially funded the new learning center, meaning they’re helping to keep the lights on, meaning App Inventor – in some way, shape or form – will live.

Google is in the process of open-sourcing the App Inventor code. As part of its research, the new Media Lab center will be engaged in studying and extending App Inventor, connecting App Inventor to MIT’s premiere research in educational technology and MIT’s historic track record of open software innovation.

Thankfully, all signs point to them letting everyone in on whatever they’ll be doing instead of keeping it for in-house use only. We still don’t know when exactly Google will release the App Inventor source, but they promised to retire the project by the end of the year, meaning we should see source code sometime within the next 4-5 months.