The application was made available through request on July 12, 2010, and released publicly on December 15, 2010. The App Inventor team was led by
Hal Abelson In the second half of 2011, Google released the source code, terminated its server, and provided funding to create
The MIT Center for Mobile Learning, led by App Inventor creator Hal Abelson and fellow MIT professors Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. The MIT version was launched in March 2012. MIT released App Inventor 2, renaming the original version "App Inventor Classic" Major differences are: • The
blocks editor in the original version ran in a separate Java process, using the
Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages and programming Open Blocks is distributed by MIT's
Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) and is derived from master's thesis research by Ricarose Roque. Professor Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program supported the distribution of Open Blocks under an
MIT License. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to
StarLogo TNG, a project of STEP, and
Scratch, a project of the
MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group led by
Mitchel Resnick. App Inventor 2 enables real-time debugging on connected devices via
Wi-Fi, or Universal Serial Bus (
USB). In addition to this the user may use an "on computer" emulator available for
Windows,
MacOS, and
Linux. == Spin-offs ==