MacOS Sonoma 14.0 MIT needs update everytime

Bugs and Other Issues
1

I have MacOS Sonoma 14.0.
Installed: MIT_App_Inventor_Setup_3.0rc3.dmg
MIT: 2.46

For certain features (ie User Interface Switch) I get an error when trying to run the emulator.
I need the MIT to be updated.
I go to Help/Update companion, which than goes through this whole process and MIT 2.76u is loaded. Once that happens, all is good.

Question. I do this EVERYTIME I log in and start up the emulator. Is there any way to load 2.76u directly?

Thank you.

2

After upgrading the emulator image, it should remain at that version unless you do a hard reset. How much free disk space do you have remaining on your machine?

3

Thank you for your response. I have 30 gb of 128gb free. I have done hard resets. Maybe I don't need to?

4

That's correct. A hard reset returns the emulator image to its initial state at the time we published it, with whatever version of the companion was current at that time. In most cases, if you're just looking to stop the emulator you should use "Reset Connection"

5

Gotcha. Thanks again. I'm assuming there's no way to replace the installed version with the updated one. Whether I could get in to the APK files and tweak or otherwise.

6

There is a way to do it but it's fairly technical. You'll need a Linux VM.

  1. Locate userdata.img.gz in /Applications/AppInventor/extras/App_Inventor.avd
  2. Copy it to the Linux VM
  3. Run gunzip userdata.img.gz to decompress the file
  4. Run mkdir tmp to create a temporary directory to mount the file system
  5. Run sudo mount -t ext4 userdata.img tmp to mount the disk image
  6. Change directory by running cd "tmp/app/MIT AI2 Companion"
  7. Update the APK with curl https://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu/companions/Emulator.apk > MITAI2Companion.apk
  8. Change directory back up to the top level with cd ../../..
  9. Unmount the disk with sudo umount tmp
  10. Recompress the disk image with gzip userdata.img
  11. Copy userdata.img.gz over the original in /Applications/AppInventor/extras/App_Inventor.avd/

At this point, you will need to hard reset, but when you do the new userdata.img should have the latest companion.

7

Wow! thanks so much for taking the time to write that out. Even if I fail, I'll try it.