Hacker News Reader

Comment by 10dpd | Hacker News Reader

13 million apps built?

Just below that metric, it links to MIT App Inventor[1]. It seems very disingenuous to post the statistics of a similar product with a tiny clause stating that those numbers aren't yours.

[1]: http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/

Yes, I flagged this for bad advertising.

It's a fork of App Inventor[1] so it's essentially a new version, built by people that built the original version[2].

Honestly it would not have been disingenuous to exclude that tiny link clause altogether, but now they're being punished for transparency, because people are too lazy to click on the the "About" link for the page they provided.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/mit-spin-out-thunkable-hope... [2] http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/our-team.html

Pretty impressive, considering that there are presently only 1.6 million apps to choose from on the Google Play Store and 1.5 million on the App Store.

;)

There have been over 13 million apps built with MIT App Inventor and Thunkable. The vast majority of these apps were built by individuals or small organizations that never published these apps to to Google Play, but instead shared it with their friends/family/colleagues. However, over 1% of the apps on Google Play have been built with Thunkable or App Inventor. Sorry if there was confusion. We'll try to make that more clear.

What counts as "building an app"? Is it someone who just pressed a couple buttons and then never came back? I just have a hard time believing the platform was used over 13 million times to build anything non-trivial. If that is the case, then major kudos to you! Either way I think tools like Thunkable have a lot of potential :)

Hey there! We are talking a fully functioning/working app. Btw, App Inventor/Thunkable apps account for more than 1% of the Google Play Store apps.

... and only on Android (iOS is not available yet) to boot!

We are building a platform for native iOS apps. It takes time :)

Can you give an indication of a realistic timeline?

Hi, Wei here (one of the co-founders of Thunkable). I can't guarantee anything here, but we are working very very very hard on this. We are hoping to get the MVP done before the end of this year :) Do you want to get into our alpha/beta tester list?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com