Google App Inventor: An Android Mobile App Developer for Everyone

Google has launched the application "Google App Inventor" aimed towards people of all backgrounds, ages, and experience levels in computer programing. To achieve this goal, Google offers a graphical interface that allows the user to experiment creating a fully-functional Android app, for a mobile device running the Android platform, by snapping together visual programing blocks.

Now all you need to build an Android application to be used on a mobile device is access to a computer and an internet connection. The App Inventor is a simple but powerful web application. A Google account is needed to use it.

App Inventor provides access to all the mobile device features so you can create your own applications to solve aspects from your personal life, home, school, or work, instead of being limited to the apps available in the Android Market.

It could be used as a great tool for education; allowing teachers to easily create educational software to help students prepare for a test or aid students with disabilities using features like TextToSpeech or Media Player.

In the future, I hope to see Google develop some kind of training program that is more in-depth than its current online tutorial system for App Inventor. This way, more users could take advantage of it, thus turning it into a widespread educational tool.

Watch an app being built using App Inventor.

Reference:

• App Inventor for Android (Wikipedia)
• Android App Inventor for Education (Tech Powered Math)
• Google’s Android App Inventor: Help or Hindrance? (LinuxInsider)