I am a teacher that has implemented App Inventor in my AP Computer Science Principles high school class. At my work, every student only uses iOS devices.
I attended the MIT AI & Education Summit over the summer, thank you guys for everything you do! When I spoke to Evan, I remember him saying that the seamless iOS build to install the app locally on an iOS device was in the pipeline.
Is there an estimated time of arrival for the seamless iOS install? I know you can create a developer account and follow the complicated process. However, this is infeasible to do with all of my students.
Thanks for the post. We're thinking of two different approaches. First, I have a proposal in that we will support a sort of "offline" mode for the companion app, which will cache projects locally on the device so they can be recalled at any time, even offline. Alternatively, the App Inventor Foundation has received funding to develop a teacher portal, and the portal may be able to associate teacher credentials to students so that students can create apps using their teacher's credentials (e.g., one dev membership could cover a whole class).
Is there an estimated time frame for either of these features? I am under the assumption that it won't be ready by January - May of 2025?
Also, I was reading another post about how extensions do not work on iOS and would have to be run through a native build, which is another contributing factor towards me wanting to have them install it locally. I tried doing the "Dance with AI" tutorial but it failed on the extension in the web browser.
I can't speak on behalf of the Foundation, but for the local caching aspect, the proposal is here and some of the functionality exists internally but just doesn't have a user interface yet.
We're working on bringing all of the MIT authored extensions to iOS. The Posenet extension is one I'm currently working on and the plan is to have support in the App Store by the end of the calendar year.