MIT Android App Inventor beta launches, caves under initial traffic

By Alex Dobie
last updated

Update: Everything seems to be up and running now.

A little ahead of schedule, the first beta version of MIT's App Inventor for Android landed on the web today at appinventor.mit.edu (opens in new tab). The App Inventor, first launched by Google in mid-2010 before being discontinued and open-sourced last year, allows just about anyone to dive directly into Android app development with a simple web-based interface. To get started with the public beta, all you need is a Google Account and a little creativity.

However the launch seems to have been a little bumpy -- earlier this morning the site was working just fine, but now MIT's servers seem to be having trouble dealing with the influx of traffic. Hopefully it'll be back up before too long -- we'll update this post whenever there are any further signs of life from MIT's site.

More: MIT App Inventor; Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Alex Dobie
Alex Dobie
Executive Editor

Alex was with Android Central for over a decade, producing written and video content for the site, and served as global Executive Editor from 2016 to 2022.

8 Comments
  • Its back up...
  • works fine now
  • it is having issues packaging the apk. Seems to be a bug more than anything.
  • having the same issue...other than that I love this! I could spend a lot of time messing with this!
  • anyone get packaging via barcode working yet?
  • i didnt get anything to work, but i'm not really sure i know what im doing haha. at least its not blocked at work yet, so i can learn... instead of work
  • packaging finally worked for me!
  • "Failure to package projects: We're currently seeing a 6% failure rate in attempts to package projects. Many of these appear to be intermittent. If your project fails to package, try again once or twice. Another source of failure may result from case collisions in the names of media files: If your project has two pictures named, for example, MyPict.jpg and mypict.jpg, this may cause errors." I finally got packaging to work also.