Application Study on Android Application Prototyping Method using App Inventor

摘要

App Inventor developed by MIT is a visual programming development environment with drag-and-drop interface which aims to help design and implement mobile apps with full functionality on Android operating system. App Inventor's intuitive blocks programming allow mobile app developers to focus on design and programming logic instead of language syntax. Apps development processes are composed of five phrases, which are discovery, wire-framing, prototyping, implementation, and deployment. In software design process, generally software architecture is divided into components called modules. We analyze that a module is composed of related blocks of App Inventor. With applying App Inventor as an Android application prototyping method, it allows android mobile application to be implemented much faster. In this study, we show the development process using App Inventor as a prototyping method is more efficient compared to using Android SDK only.