In this chapter, we describe the goals of MIT App Inventor and how they have influenced our design and development-from the program’s inception at Google in 2008, through the migration to MIT, to the present day.

The platform has also been adapted to serve requirements of more specific populations, such as building apps for emergency/first responders (Jain et al., 2015) and robotics (Papadakis & Orfanakis, 2016).

People around the world use App Inventor to provide mobile solutions to real problems in their families, communities, and the world. We offer the interface in more than a dozen languages. To date, 6.8 million people in over 190 countries have used App Inventor to build over 24 million apps. It uses a block-based programming language built on Google Blockly (Fraser, 2013) and inspired by languages such as StarLogo TNG (Begel & Klopfer, 2007) and Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009 Maloney, Resnick, Rusk, Silverman, & Eastmond, 2010), empowering anyone to build a mobile phone app to meet a need. It provides a web-based “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor for building mobile phone applications targeting the Android and iOS operating systems. MIT App Inventor is an online development platform that anyone can leverage to solve real-world problems. How then might they learn to leverage smartphone capabilities to solve real-world, everyday problems? MIT App Inventor is designed to democratize this technology and is used as a tool for learning computational thinking in a variety of educational contexts, teaching people to build apps to solve problems in their communities.

Most smartphone users consume technology without being able to produce it, even though local problems can often be solved with mobile devices. However, people have difficulty harnessing the full power of these ubiquitous devices for themselves and their communities.

The smartphone is an information nexus in today’s digital age, with access to a nearly infinite supply of content on the web, coupled with rich sensors and personal data.

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