MIT App Inventor for iOS on the App Store

Mar 4, 2021 evan's Blog

Hello everyone,

It is with great pleasure that the App Inventor team announces that the MIT App Inventor companion app for iOS is now generally available on the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac. At over 66,000 lines of code, this has been a tremendous undertaking by the team. I am eternally grateful for the effort and perseverance they have put into bringing what began as a simple proof of concept to a fully fledged app. As part of this effort, we have endeavored to make all existing App Inventor curricula work the same on both the iOS and Android versions so that teachers and students can work in mixed device environments. If you encounter an issue, please report it.

I particularly would like to thank the staff and students have contributed to the iOS version over the years (in alphabetical order):

• Nichole Clarke (M.Eng.)
• Kendall Garner (Undergraduate)
• Susan Lane (Staff)
• Li Li (Staff)
• Andrew McKinney (Staff)
• Viktoriya Tabunshchyk (Undergraduate)
• Joy Yu (Undergraduate)

This work would not have been possible without the continued support of all of the App Inventor team members over the years. Thank you to everyone on the team, past and present, who has helped test and the over 5000 external beta testers who have tried the software and given us feedback. And of course a special thanks to Hal Abelson, Mark Friedman, and the other Googlers who had the vision and wherewithal to create App Inventor over a decade ago, and to whose technical prowess the whole App Inventor community is indebted.

There is still much work to be done, of course, as we continue to align the two versions of App Inventor. For details about differences between the two versions, please see this page. We’re also looking forward to bringing out the ability to compile iOS apps in a future release, as well as adding support for new components such as our Artificial Intelligence extensions, BluetoothLE, and more. Please continue the conversation or report issues in the App Inventor for iOS community.

On a personal note, I wrote the first proof of concept in October 2016 with what started as a simple Scheme interpreter performing math operations by running them on my iPhone via HTTP and cURL, so it is a tremendous honor for me to see, four and a half years later, this project come to fruition. It has been a long hard road for all of us and it’s been a real blessing to cross the finish line. I hope that many more people will be inspired to solve real world problems through computational action with access to this iOS version.

Cheers,

Evan W. Patton, Ph.D.
Lead Software Engineer, MIT App Inventor
On behalf of the MIT App Inventor team