App Inventor Development 2024 Year in Review

Dec 19, 2024 evan's Blog

Hello everyone and welcome to our 2024 Year in Review for App Inventor development.

First, let’s highlight our amazing user base (click here to read about some of the awesome projects they built in this year’s Global AI Hackathon). We saw significant growth in users and projects year over year with a 15% increase over last year: as of December 14, we recorded 23.1 million users and 111.6 million projects created with App Inventor via our flagship server ai2.appinventor.mit.edu. Over 10.2 million users visit have used the service in the last 12 months according to Google Analytics, and they collectively averaged about 20 minutes per session. Globally, our top ten countries and regions are:

The United States of America (1.1M)
Taiwan (1.1M)
Mexico (903k)
Indonesia (667k)
India (659k)
Spain (632k)
South Korea (443k)
Hong Kong (437k)
Brazil (401k)
Colombia (287k)

With respect to the platform’s development, this has been a productive year. We’ll discuss the larger developments in a moment, but I want to take this time in particular to thank our external contributors. @gordonlu310 was the most prolific external contributor with 6 commits and @SimoneSantin contributed the largest amount of code through his work implementing AI components for iOS during this year’s Google Summer of Code. @patryk84a also gets a special shout out for the work he has done and continues to do to add functionality and performance enhancements to the ListView component. Overall, we had 20 external contributors get code merged into App Inventor this year in addition to 9 staff and students from MIT. In total, 153 commits were made this year. The largest non-housekeeping change was 6694 lines, the new UI by MIT Software Engineer Susan Lane (@SusanRatiLane on GitHub).

Big Developments

New UI

Over the summer we released a UI refresh for App Inventor. This project, led by developer Susan Lane, was one of the largest changes to App Inventor’s code base in its development history. Current users can switch to the new UI by going to Settings > User Settings in the menu. The new UI will be the default starting next summer.

BLE update for Android 14

Every year we have to update App Inventor to comply with SDK related changes in the Android operating system. This year brought some substantial changes to Bluetooth low energy on Android 14. If you’re an Android 14 user, or if you deploy your apps to the Google Play Store, make sure to update to the latest BLE extension. The latest extension version is 20240822.

iOS

Our iOS update this year is massive and brings a number of great components to those of you using iPhones and iPads with App Inventor. The list of supported new components includes:

Personal Image Classifier
Personal Audio Classifier
Bluetooth low energy support (certain features only)
Micro:bit Simple UART support
Posenet
Facemesh
Chart
ChartData2D
Trendline
AnomalyDetection
Regression
LinearProgress
CircularProgress

Blockly Update

The final major undertaking this year was an update to Blockly. Google Blockly is a library for building block-based coding environments like App Inventor (side note: it was originally developed for App Inventor but now underpins many online visual coding environments). Our previous update to the block environment was in 2017, and a lot of work has been done since then to make the environment faster and more modular. This work is also in preparation for improved accessibility in App Inventor thanks to a grant received by the App Inventor Foundation from Google.org. Some of the new features you can expect to see in this update include:

Use the Ctrl/Option keys to drag a block from a middle of a stack
Use shift to draw a box around multiple blocks to move them or change common fields
Blocks like “create list” and “join” grow in size automatically if you drag a block near them to connect
The workspace automatically scrolls if you drag a block near the edge

We will be rolling out additional features in the coming months.

Thank you to all of our users, especially our power users for their help in the forum, for your continued support of App Inventor.