Hi all,

I’m one of the creators of Thunkable, along with WeiHua Li. It is a drag-and-drop tool for anyone to build native mobile apps. We've been working on this tool at MIT and Google for the past few years as an open source project called MIT App Inventor, and we decided to make a product (Thunkable) around it to better support our users. We’re in the current YC W2016 batch.

There are two parts to the tool:

Designer: Allows you to create an app UI by adding different UI components to your screen, such as buttons, TextBoxes, GoogleMaps, etc. It also allows you to add non-visible components to your apps, such as SMS receivers or NFC sensors.

Blocks: Thunkable has a blocks-based programming language that makes it easy for novice programmers to use, but is sophisticated enough for seasoned developers to use (you can make functions, variables, callbacks, etc.).

Thunkable then compiles the blocks (Java/Javascript) to Scheme to binary .apk.

There is also a Thunkable app on the Play Store that you can connect to your Thunkable web app, to test your apps. The app live interprets everything that you add to Thunkable in the browser and shows it on your phone in real-time.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how to make it better, and what things we don’t yet support that you’d like to see.

Thanks, Arun