Smart Skills Updates

Updates to MIT App Inventor were made on 11 and 31 July 2018, and users will see a pop-up screen alerting them to this on sign-in. The most visible change introduced by update nb170 is the addition of two new options to the Build menu to build Apps for Google Play. Students should continue to use the first two options, which ensure wider compatibility with Android devices. The full details of the change are explained in the release notes for those who want to know more.

If you use the AI2 Companion App on an Android device in order to use the WiFi or USB 'live programming' methods, you should update to the current version. If you installed the Companion App from the Google Play store, it will update automatically; if you installed it directly to your device (e.g. Amazon Fire tablet), you will need to manually update to version 2.47 at appinv.us/companion.

We currently recommend Firefox as the best browser for downloading APK files, in preference to Silk or Chrome. Firefox 62 was recently released; it is available in the Play Store on Android devices, and can be downloaded from this page for Amazon Fire tablets: click the first green download arrow (the one without x86 on it).