In the last few years, we’ve seen a growing amount of use of the App Inventor web app on smartphones. I’m not even sure how people are managing to do that. It must involve an absurd amount of scrolling and zoom/unzoom. There are a large number of families worldwide whose primary access to the Internet is through smartphones, and we’d like App Inventor to be a practical option for those people.
@DivynashuNYK built a mobile UI as part of Google Summer of Code 2025. We’re hoping to release it this summer. I’d be grateful for thoughts and feedback.
The tutorial view is not supported, and projects linked from the the No Projects Dialog use it. (The No Projects Dialog is what appears if you have no projects at all on your project list.)
The Project Properties dialog needs to be completely redesigned for mobile and will be huge.
There is no way to test using the Companion on the same device you are using to build with App Inventor. In order to test, you need to either build the app and download to your phone or connect to the Companion on a second phone/device.
Note: The mobile UI must be tested on a mobile device. If you load that link with a browser, you’ll see the web interface.
I have my phone set to show the three Android buttons (Back arrow, Close circle, Tasks square) on the bottom of the display.
Navigation could have benefitted from more use of the Back button, especially within nested Arrangements.
My phone's Back button switched the Project to the previously opened Project.
The mock display was hard to zoom or scroll. I ended up inadvertently dragging mock components around when trying to navigate. A pinch zoom would have helped a lot.
I discovered that the four view tabs on the bottom of the Designer display implicitly allowed return to the mock display by repeat clicking on the current tab button. (Not obvious).
As a data point, I just want to add that one of the reasons for this work is that according to our analytics, around 10% of our users of the web editor (ai2, ai2a, code, code2) are using it on a mobile form factor. This enhancement aims at making the experience more streamlined for those with limited access to technology (i.e., a single mobile device).
When I occasionally use MS Paint to freshen up my icon, I depend on the way it changes my cursor to tell me what will happen when I drag or click on my drawing, whether it be a stroke of a pen, a drag of an inserted paste, or a resize of a selection frame
Action buttons ( Rename, Delete ) on the Components tree can be on top of the bottom navigation bar. That way, we don't have to scroll every time we need to use them.
