hal's blog

Change to Google’s policy for the Play Store may require changes to App Inventor apps

hal — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 20:59:29 +0000

Google recently released a new Play Store policy that will affect some App Inventor apps.
All apps that use the Texting or PhoneCall component AND are published in the Play Store must be rebuilt. The MIT App Inventor team is making a change to PhoneCall and Texting to help our users deal with this Google policy.

How will this affect my App Inventor apps and what do I need to do?

With Google’s change, if you create an App Inventor app that uses Phone or Texting components, you will not be able to submit it to Google Play.

The MIT App Inventor team is changing the Texting and PhoneCall components so that newly built apps will satisfy Google’s restrictions and can be submitted to Play just as before. We’re currently testing the changes, and we’ll release them in App Inventor as soon as February 2019.

Google is also planning to remove from Play apps that violate their policy. If that happens to you, you’ll need to wait for the change to App Inventor, and then rebuild your app and resubmit it to Play,

What is the Google Play Store policy change?

Google’s change is that they will no longer permit apps in the Play Store that directly send Text messages (SMS) or make phone calls. Instead you must invoke the device's built in Text Messaging (or phone call) application. For example, an app that periodically sends texts without notifying the phone’s user will no longer be accepted to the Play Store, and Google might also remove such apps that are currently in the Play Store. Google has also created a process where developers can fill out a form asking that their app be allowed as an exception to the policy. Look here for the information Google has provided:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9047303

Will my apps behave differently after App Inventor changes?

Yes, there will be a change. When you use Texting.SendMessage, the phone will now route the message to the phone’s normal text message sending application. Similarly for Phone.MakePhoneCall.

Can I still use App Inventor to build apps that violate Google’s policy for Play?

Yes.

MIT’s change to App Inventor will include alternate versions of Texting.SendMessage and Phone.MakePhoneCall that do directly send texts and make phone calls. You can build apps with these alternate versions and share them with your friends and family. But you would need to ask Google for a policy exception in order to publish those apps in the Play Store.

We’ll post again when we release these features into the main MIT App Inventor.

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MIT App Inventor Team nominated for Distinguished Leadership Award

hal — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:41:14 +0000

August 10, 2017

We on the MIT App Inventor team are thrilled to announce that our team has been nominated to receive a 2017 Distinguished Leadership Award from the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

MassTLC is the largest and most powerful technology association in the region, with the mission of accelerating growth and innovation in the Massachusetts technology industry. Their awards celebrate region’s most notable technology leaders, companies and technologies. We’re gratified and humbled to considered among their rank. Even more so because the nomination calls out our work in helping to make tech more accessible and empowering people around the globe.

The 20th Annual Mass Technology Leadership Awards Gala will take place on the evening of Thursday, September 14th, at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. We’re looking forward to attending in ourselves, while constantly mindful that the real honorees are the members of the App Inventor community, who are actualizing our technology to improve lives through your creativity and your vision.

Hal Abelson

Director, MIT App Inventor

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Experiments with Virtual Reality and MIT App Inventor

hal — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 01:42:06 +0000

Interest in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications is exploding. Last month's Pokemon Go craze barely hints at what's coming. Should we look forward to App Inventor creating apps with VR and AR?

I want to give a shout- out to Kseniia Shumelchyk , who worked with MIT App Inventor this summer in Google's Summer of Code program, creating App Inventor apps for Google's Cardboard viewer. You can see her paper about this here:

Experiments with Virtual Reality and MIT App Inventor

Kseniia's paper presents two demo apps -- one that shows a panorama view and one that shows a 3D object. You can run these demos, or build them for yourself and modify them. Kseniia's project uses an auxiliary Java app that provides interface for the App Inventor ActiviyStarter to call the Google VR libraries.

This work is only just starting: There's a lot to do to integrate mode VR and AR capabilities into App Inventor, and even more to do in creating great App Inventor apps that use these capabilities.

Thanks, Kseniia, for showing us how to get started!

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Welcome Mike Tissenbaum and Evan Patton to the MIT App Inventor team

hal — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 23:39:27 +0000

Welcome Mike Tissenbaum and Evan Patton to the MIT App Inventor team

Those of us at MIT this summer already know Mike and Evan, but I'd like to announce to the entire App Inventor community our delight at welcoming two our new members to the core MIT App Inventor team.

Mike Tissenbaum comes to App Inventor upon completing a postdoc in Madison at the School of Education, University Wisconsin, a position he took up after earning a Ph.D. at University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Mike's work on design principles to support collaborative inquiry in smart classrooms was nominated as the best student paper at the 2014 International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS). He's interested in formal and informal learning environments to support computational literacies, and in gaining insight into these through data mining and learning analytics. Mike has developed and run several multi-week after-school Scratch programming Camps for kids 8-16, and he's looking forward to advancing research into blocks-based programming environments and how they support learners in developing socially relevant questions about the world. At MIT, Mike is assuming the position of research scientist in App Inventor's project for the Hong Kong primary schools on computational thinking and coding education.

Our second new team member, Evan Patton, recently completed his doctorate at RPI. Evan is new to the MIT team, but hardly new to App Inventor -- he's been a prime contributor to the Punya platform (an extension of App Inventor) and he developed the unit testing framework for Punya and App Inventor. Beyond App Inventor, he’s been a consultant to startups in developing both Android and iOS applications. He also administered and developed hardware to support Web applications with large user bases in the scientific community. At MIT, Evan has now become a senior member of the App Inventor development team, and he has with special responsibility for our infrastructure with the Hong Kong project.

Mike and Evan bring enormous expertise and greatly increase capacity to the MIT team.

Welcome!

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App Inventor’s debt to Seymour Papert

hal — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 14:39:32 +0000

To the App Inventor Community:

I join in grief with my colleagues in computing and education at passing of Seymour Papert on July 31, 2016. Papert was the world’s preeminent visionary in educational technology: you can read testaments to his greatness in the obituaries in the New York Times and the MIT News. Few people in the App Inventor community would have met him, and only some know his monumental book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. But his genius has touched those of us who built App Inventor and everyone who uses it.

More ...

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MIT App Inventor and Youth Radio to launch the Youth News Network STEM desk

hal — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 22:08:37 +0000

I’m exhilarated to announce that MIT App Inventor and Youth Radio (https://youthradio.org/) are beginning a 3-year initiative to launch the STEM Desk for Youth News Network (YNN). YNN will be a new nationwide model for STEM education based on youth-driven, multimedia journalism and related app development with App Inventor. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Informal STEP Learning program.

Youth Radio trains young people in digital media and technology and launches them on career and education pathways. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, it serves as National Public Radio’s Youth Desk and reports stories by and about young people across the U.S., bringing youth perspectives to issues of public concern.

YNN aims to overturn conventional beliefs about teens and their phones: that these devices are sources of distraction, addiction, abuse, and other forms of trouble.
The centerpiece of YNN will be Youth Mobile Power, a series of stories about young people using mobile technologies with creativity and purpose to empower themselves and their communities: activities such as tracking access to fresh water in poor communities, supporting effective autism treatment, and promoting safety on college campuses. The stories will build on Youth Radio’s Peabody Award-winning media production capabilities and MIT’s technology strengths to create powerful multimedia productions augmented by new mobile computing resources built on App Inventor.

The App Inventor team is tremendously excited by this opportunity to collaborate with Youth Radio. We’ll be starting work on the project in September. Watch for us over the next 3 years as we help support and promote the next generation of mobile STEM media innovators!

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