MIT and Google just have announced an initial free and open-source release of the ‘App Inventor’ source code for Android.

Initially launched to public on December 15, 2010, App Inventor was a DIY tool for building Android apps for novices with little to no knowledge of coding. When the product was not picked up to Google’s expectations, company decided to close it down and give it to open source community in the supervision of MIT Media Lab.

After decided to shutter Google Labs by Google now it would close its Picnik image editing service, Urchin web analytics tool, social graph API, Google Sky Map, and several other Google products, Google announced.

Some of those items will live on in other forms. Urchin led to Google Analytics. Google has used Picnik’s technology to add image editing capabilities to some of its other products. And Google Sky Map will go open source so that other developers can pick up where Google left off.

The search engine giant has continually expanded its business and influence, so it stands to reason sometimes projects will be shuttered or released in order to allow Google to strengthen other areas. For those that would like a crack at improving software or products, making the App Inventor open source gives others this chance.

It’s taken close to half a year, but now the first open source version of App Inventor is available. Interested Developers can now grab the code from here, and start building their own versions of App Inventor.

Via - Hack Education