10 August 2011, 10:50

Google's App Inventor closing down

With the closure of Google Labs, a number of projects' futures were in doubt. One of these was Google's App Inventor for Android, released just over a year ago. App Inventor which was designed to allow non-programmers to create Android applications by dragging, dropping and connecting blocks of code to create a complete application. Initially, Google said the App Inventor service would be untouched except for a new URL.

But Google has now confirmed that its hosted service for the proprietary application creation system will close by the end of the year. It is planning to open source the code that powers the system, and says that, as App Inventor was a success "in the education space", it is hoping to make special provision for that use on an open source educational platform.

No details have been given about which licence will be used, what requirements the App Inventor software will have or exactly when the code will be open sourced. Comments on the announcement also raised concerns that the audience for the application, namely inexperienced non-programmers, may not have the resources or ability to handle a server-side project such as App Inventor on their own.

(djwm)

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