Abstract:

The article deals with specific aspects of mobile application development for Android operating system using educational development environment MIT App Inventor 2. MIT App Inventor 2 was developed as an educational tool. The article verifies whether its capabilities go beyond the limits of its use in education and whether it finds use in areas other than education. Furthermore, its restrictive properties are identified and the extent of limitations in the development of mobile applications is verified.

The mobile application development using MIT App Inventor 2 is compared with native development using Java programming language, Android SDK and Android Studio professional development environment in a comparative study. The sources of information for the study are indexed scientific articles and professional publications, own experience in mobile application development in both compared environments and experience in teaching programming of mobile applications during two school years with different target groups of students. The comparison is structured according to the phases of application development from project creation, graphical user interface creation, application logic implementation, application testing and debugging, to application building, sharing and installation. The specific aspects of mobile application development in both compared environments are illustrated with development of two sample applications. As the result of the comparative study, the capabilities and limitations of MIT App Inventor 2 are identified and recommendations on how it can be used in practise are formulated.

The development of mobile applications in the MIT App Inventor 2 is intuitive. The complexity of development is reduced regarding the time of development, the knowledge level of programming and software technologies, and the complexity of the whole development process. MIT App Inventor 2 simplifies the development process in all its phases. Thanks to that, App Inventor is a suitable development tool for beginner programmers and for teaching programming in schools. Furthermore, it can be used in rapid development of mobile application prototypes. Creating own mobile applications becomes more accessible to more people with MIT App Inventor 2 and not just for a narrow circle of professional developers.

However, simplicity of the entire development process in MIT App Inventor 2 brings several constraints of development opportunities. The developer has limited possibilities to design the individual application components, their usage and configuration. Despite this, in case of sample applications, the design and functionality requirements have been met, although with some deviations from applications developed in native way of development. Procedures to improve the usability of the researched development environment are suggested for selected identified constraints. We have applied many of these suggestions in our own practice to verify their usability.

Keywords:

App Inventor, mobile application development, programming, comparative study.