App Inventor + Kodular Planned Collaboration

We're aware of that, and ultimately it will be fully compatible so all Kodular users can keep working with their projects in App Inventor.

Maintaining any kind of mobile development platform like either App Inventor or Kodular requires a lot of time to keep up with updates from the vendors (Google, Apple). And because of that, we think that maintaining just a single platform with the double of developers is going to be better.
From Kodular side, we've been migrating some features since years ago (components, functionality, etc.), and most of us have worked on MIT App Inventor projects as part of Google Summer of Code (visible extensions, project folders, AAB...). So you can also see this upcoming collaboration as a deeper one, but a permanent and well established one as well.

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Yes, may these unbearable, yearly new restrictions (for developers & users) from Google finally come to an end!!! With my iOS apps (built with Xcode & Swift) I've only had one issue - and exactly one - at Apple (and it happened with the horrible iOS 13 update - the worst iOS version ever).

With my Android apps, I have to make adjustments almost every year so that the apps are still available for all Android versions in the Play Store.

Yes of course, we'll see ... I'm curious ...
I'm a pretty savvy bug spotter, as most of you probably know. :wink:


Btw, what will be the minSdkVersion then? Probably no longer 7 (Android 2.1, Eclair), right?

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Internally this is what we've been calling it, but there's no guarantee we'll go with that moniker once the work is done, especially since the work is being incorporated into the existing open source platform.

At the moment we are discussing dropping support for SDKs below 14 during our summer update. The last holdout preventing this was the emulator package, of which the old one runs Android 2.1, but with both of the Windows and macOS versions running at least Android 5, we likely don't need to support it. The lowest SDK version we currently see in the rendezvous server is 17.

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Are there also policies on users in communities, specifically the following.

  • There is a ProKoders group in Kodular for Kodular users that had outstanding contributions in the forum. Will these users enjoy the same privilege after migrating to AppInventor Community?

  • Is it OK to talk about different builders like Niotron, in this community, without restrictions as long as if they do not violate the ToS? Are builders, like Niotron, considered competitive, or are they still treated like a branch of AppInventor?

  • Will Kodular community be deprecated after this? This would lose hundreds (or even thousands) of valuable work like projects and extensions. We've seen AppyBuilder and Thunkable users not saving their work, and we had to rescue the extensions one by one.

  • There are a lot of users in Kodular community who just post "this not working please help" and "that not working please help". If those users migrate to AppInventor Community and still bring their practices to here, are there any policies on dealing with them?

  • Continuing from point 4, if so many users migrate to AppInventor, is there enough people like power users to help? I'm afraid of a lot of questions in the community unanswered, and users would spam this community.

Sorry, I might have been a bit too extreme. I'm just expressing my concerns.

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What and who should prevent me - or whoever - from doing this?

Niotron, of course, is an AI2 clone, but it turned out very well and successfully, having almost the same features and even more than Kodular. It is also possible to import projects in both directions as long as components included in both builders are used. In this respect, Niotron is definitely competitive!

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Nobody, just in some builders, I've noticed that specific names are banned, specifically the names of other builders. I just don't understand this, builders are supposed to help each other.

And it's not one, but multiple that do this. I'm not targeting one specific builder, I'm just expressing my concerns.

So, in general, is Niotron a rival ( a competitor, not an enemy) of AI2 after this implementation?

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AI2 will need better .aia import filters, able to recognize the various AI2 variants and either to politely reject them or dumb them down.

This would help board members trying to debug blocks of uncertain origin.

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Why and from whose point of view should it be an enemy?
It's a competitor, of course, and I've gone to the trouble of migrating some projects from Kodular to it, which practically means building them almost from scratch.

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Since most projects come from Kodular, this should then be obsolete with / after the cooperation. As already mentioned, Niotron projects can be imported into AI2 as long as no components are used that AI2 does not have. Otherwise the project cannot be imported at all.

Hmm, what (component) requires API 17 (Android 4.2, JELLY BEAN MR1)?

I don't see any reason we wouldn't do this.

The terms of service for this platform are not changing and we have never blocked discussion of other platforms.

App Inventor will continue to remain open source and people will continue to build their own forks of it. We always hope that they will contribute back to the project in some meaningful way, such as how @Diego et al. have done via GSOC and with this new collaboration.

While I think this is ultimately a question for @Diego, it may be possible for us to figure out a way of serving an archive of the community as a means of protecting the generated knowledge. There are still some details to work out.

There are already people who do that here and we do our best to help them.

I think it's important to note the vast majority of App Inventor users do not use the community. In the past 30 days there have been 960,000 people who used App Inventor and in the same time frame there were about 2100 active users here. I don't know the usage numbers for Kodular but I have a hard time imagining we would double that figure. We can always add more power users from those who make stand out contributions to the community.

No. By virtue of being open source naturally other tools will build on App Inventor. I imagine this also means that eventually they will pull in the new and updated components from Kodular.

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We are considered competitive, but we are just providing a service. :sweat_smile:

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One does not contradict the other.

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Maybe after the Kodular and App Inventor collaboration is complete other builders could join.

This would make the App Inventor universe even bigger. More developers working on the same codebase would only benefit all the children that could start making apps to help their community.

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You certainly are Anke :trophy:

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That would probably be too expensive.

Expensive?

... developers need an income

I don't think there is any App Inventor based builder that can give developers a full time job. They get income from the ads to pay for server fees etc.

If the collaboration between Kodular and App Inventor works, and I can't see why not it could serve as an example.

Nothing of that nature gets done without money involved, it is very time consuming - unless the people involved are retired and living on a pension perhaps.......