There are thousands of mobile apps out there, and now Google is making it easier for users to create countless more. Their new App Inventor for Android was initially tested by schools as well as universities to ensure user-friendliness, and after a year of development, the software is out.
A simple “drag and drop” allows users to create basic apps using visual commands as opposed to technical programming of codes. Users can develop a wide range of personalized apps, from games and photo-manipulating to information-based apps.
Harold Abelson is a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was the one responsible for the project. He recently said in an article with Techtree.com, "The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world. We could only have done this because Android's architecture is so open. These aren't the slickest applications in the world... but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes."
The official App Inventor site goes on to offer more creative uses for the software: “Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts ‘missing you’ to your loved ones, or an app ‘No Text While Driving’ that responds to all texts automatically with ‘sorry, I'm driving and will contact you later’. App Inventor provides a way for you to communicate with the web. If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter.”
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