Open Sourcing of MIT App Inventor for iOS

Mar 27, 2023 evan's Blog

Hello everyone,

We are happy to announce that today we are open sourcing the implementation of MIT App Inventor for iOS. The iOS version is being released under the same license as the Android version, i.e., Apache 2.0.

The iOS version is composed of three parts:

SchemeKit: SchemeKit is a framework that provides a Scheme implementation that can interface with Objective-C and Swift. This serves the same purpose on iOS as Kawa serves on Android. The framework wraps a Scheme written in C, called Picrin, with extensions we have created to support invoking Objective-C code.
AIComponentKit: AIComponentKit is a framework that provides the implementations of the App Inventor components in Swift.
AICompanionApp: AICompanionApp is the implementation of the MIT App Inventor companion app in Swift for compilation in Xcode.

The projects are made available as part of a single Xcode workspace called AppInventor.xcworkspace, which can be found in the appinventor directory of the sources.

The iOS version has been contributed to by the following MIT members over the years:

Andrew McKinney
David Kim
Evan Patton
Joy Yu
Kendall Garner
Li Li
Nichole Clarke
Susan Lane
Viktoriya Tabunshchyk

We welcome pull requests from our open source community to improve and expand on the work done by our team at MIT. Please check out the latest changes in our GitHub repository.

Our release process will only change slightly going forward. Commits that update behavior either for Android and iOS should be submitted to the ucr branch. Releases of the iOS companion will be conducted from ucr in the short term as we continue to improve its capabilities and bring it towards parity with the Android version. Updates to the App Inventor editor and the Android version will still be done from master following our existing procedures.

Cheers,

Evan W. Patton, Ph.D.
Lead Software Engineer, MIT App Inventor