MIT App Inventor usage triples over the 2014-2015 academic year

The above graph shows the worldwide usage on the MIT App Inventor site from January 2014 through May 2015 for AI1 (App Inventor Classic) shown in red and AI2 in green.  These numbers count “unique weekly active users,” i.e., the number of people who used each site in a week, with no multiple counting for multiple visits.  The numbers do not include visits to the App Inventor site at appinventor.mit.edu, only the sites used for creating apps:  beta.appinventor.mit.edu for AI Classic, and ai2.appinventor.mit.edu for AI2.   These numbers also do not include use of App Inventor servers other than the MIT server.

Use of AI Classic declined smoothly over 2014 from 26,000 users weekly to 6500 weekly.  That’s in keeping with our MIT plan of having people transition off Classic to AI2.  We will shut Classic down on July 15, 2015.

For App Inventor 2, use of the public MIT server has tripled over the past year.  In September 2014 there were 42,000 unique active users building apps each week.  The corresponding number in May 2015 was 127,900.  MIT App inventor currently has 3.3 million registered users from 185 countries, who among them have worked on 8.9 million mobile apps.

As the chart shows, usage dropped during summer 2104 and recovered in the fall.  There were sharp large dips over New Years and in February and April 2015.  These times correspond to school vacations.  This which suggests that a great deal of App Inventor usage is happening at schools and colleges,  although we’ll need to collect better information to verify that.