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Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo
theodp writes "Google took some heat for pulling the plug on App Inventor for Android, but all was good with the announcement that App Inventor would live on at MIT. But try to run the App Inventor Java test today and you'll be told that 'as of December 31, 2011, Google ended support of App Inventor', even though the Google-funded Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab won't be able to provide a large scale App Inventor service for general public access until 'sometime in the first quarter of 2012.' Until then, schools offering App Inventor classes and others who desire continued access to the easy-to-use mobile development environment are advised to try to run their own App Inventor Services on Google App Engine using MIT's test JAR files, a seemingly daunting task, especially considering App Inventor's target audience. Any thoughts on why Google would unplug the old system before the new one was ready?"
I've said for a long time that it's just stupid to trust Google to keep any of their services up and running and to rely on them. You get what you pay for. People who still haven't got that are just going to see more services they use dropped.
Include flamebait targeting Apple here
The moment I read the headline, I got a mental image of "Google" scientists playing limbo with some guy and when they had him bent over backwards, they trapped him. Sorry... that's just weird... sorry about that.
This is not surprising at all. What is surprising is that they gave advanced notice. Google doesn't lay down any timelines or plans for any of their schtuff. They invent it, put it out there and at some point, turn it off. How can you expect them to keep things running when they seldom even write documentation for the stuff they have out there? If they do write documentation it is released way after the release of new features and often right before a new release nullifies that documentation.
Google's view is it's ours so we will or won't support it at our whim.
Because they don't give a shit about app inventor!
I don't mean this as criticism of Google, but it's a major company whose interest is making money. Something like this is pretty much irrelevant to its operations. Some other priority -- internally or externally -- got in the way of what they were doing, so they pulled the plug. Those who think Google (or any other company) does things just to be helpful are living in fantasy land. This is what's wrong with relying on free services. If a company can make money by offering you a service, that service will continue. If it can't -- and it some other interest gets in the way -- your service will be gone. If you truly care about something, pay for it from a provider who has a financial interest in keeping your business.
Yes, because open sourcing and handing over a project to an institute of higher learning where the basic components of that project were developed is a sign of true pure evil.
Or, you know, a company making a business decision that supports FOSS. Whichever way Slashdot is leaning today.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
What about this makes them evil? They are entitled to withdraw a service, that doesn't make them evil at all. Just because the third party replacement service isn't ready doesn't oblige them to do anything.
It seems obvious to me, that they are blatantly ignoring your sense of entitlement.
How dare Google for having the unbridled audacity to not keep their free experimental service and software project fully maintained and supported 100% of the time after donating it to the MIT Media Lab, until the Media Lab was able to deploy their service.
Sure, it could be a bit frustrating if you were a heavy user of it, but at the same time is it really fair to criticize them for not being quite generous enough and on your terms?
Neither do individuals.
Maybe these "schools" who offered "classes" in App Inventor should first have someone on hand who knows enough about computers to get the service up and running.
And maybe, just MAYBE they should have had that all set up already, considering they're (presumably) charging money for the class.
What's next classes on Minecraft? Oh wait...
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You get what you pay for.
No you don't; you get what you have a contract for and can afford the lawyers to enforce* as long as it costs less than paying the penalties in the contract. We've already had one of these stories today, where it was mentioned that Microsoft provides guarantees. That's not entirely true (they provide guarantees for windows; not for some other products; different ones for different people etc. etc); but for the most part most of the serious IT vendors, Microsoft included, do things like:
If Google and co want to be taken seriously they need to do at least the second thing.
* provided that you do "due dilligence" to make sure that the company actually can do what they have promised in the first place and that you are reasonably lucky and they don't, for example, go bankrupt from some stupid patent lawsuit.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
They're evil?
I wouldn't call continually starting projects they have no intention of finishing evil. It is more like the corporate version of ADD. People ask me why I dont use more Google services even though I have an android phone. Unless a google service is funded by an external entity, you never know if it is going to be around once you start to rely on it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Assume that any Google service that doesn't have ads is going away. They've discontinued everything from the Google search API to Google Scholar. Wikipedia has a full list, from Google Aardvark to Google Web Accelerator. Most of the no-revenue services are already gone.
What about this makes them evil?
Nothing. It does make them stupid though. You'd think they'd want as many apps as they can get (and young minds learning their platform). Developers, Developers, Developers!
Why don't you quote the rest?
"Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google does list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page and links to Chilling Effects for explanation."
To put it shortly: out of 57634762346346 sites google was legally forced to remove 113 sites from the index and despite this you can still learn what URLs had the removed sites from the takedown notices.
Doesn't sound evil to me.
Google announced the dropping of App Inventor months ago. And it was announce in August that MIT was taking it over.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/08/16/2048207/app-inventor-continues-life-at-mit
So, why is the story about Google dropping a service, and not about MIT properly preparing their service?
Especially if classes were being prepared for this, you would think that MIT would have gotten things up and running in 3 months. Or, were they just relying on Google to keep it up for another year?
For critical systems I only trust myself.
I trust everything I have physical control over and have up to date backups/mirrors of to not stop working the next day. Which pretty much rules out that I would ever trust any "cloud" services that are not offered in an technical identical way by multiple companies.
Your Windows Mobile, Zune or Kin device keeps working today. What's ended is "support", which doesn't preclude you from keeping using it. But when Google pulls the plug, it's just gone - the wonders of online services.
Relevant: http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/faq-app-inventor-transition-mit
I've been involved with the App Inventor community for a while; anyone who has been using AAI has known this time was coming. The hard deadline was set by Google a while back, the target from MIT was to get an analogue to the appinventorbeta.com service up and running by 12/31. They're a little short of that goal for a few important reasons.
Most importantly, the original App Inventor engine (at google) ran on top of google-proprietary internals. That is to say, it was not possible to spin out the App Inventor backend (which handles building and packaging an APK file from the blocks program) onto MIT servers without doing what amounted to a complete rewrite to enable it to run on App Engine. Google supported this effort and handed it off to MIT, who have been working hard to get an up-and-running system ASAP. As for right now:
If you absolutely rely on App Inventor, you can now run your own parallel instance of the backend by deploying the system as linked in the OP. This works nicely, because now the system is completely under your control (and you can hack it if you choose). This is useful for people teaching classes that use AAI as a platform (as I will be doing later this semester), but isn't so great for hobby programmers.
If you want something that runs like the old appinventorbeta.com site, allowing you to write apps but not have to worry about putting up your own backend server, wait a few weeks. There will be something up on appinventoredu.mit.edu fairly soon.
The reason why this transition is taking so long is nothing so nefarious as Google or MIT being evil or bad citizens. It's simple, really: there's not that many people actually doing coding for the project, and there's been a lot of coding to do. It'll be out soon. Patience, young apprentices.
App Inventor isn't going away, and as a matter of fact, the list of new features and useful extensions that are targeted for the coming few years is exciting and compelling.