[Gareth Rae]

16/01/2013 at 12:26 pm

I’m just about to start using the fantastic Mobile App Development resource by Jeremy Scott. Is it possible to load the apps created successfully onto an Android mobile phone or tablet? If so any suggestions on what mobile phone or tablet to buy? Looking to purchase a couple for the department.

[auchteach]

16/01/2013 at 6:29 pm

Hi Gareth

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Y to work through the resource. It’s great seeing the app appear on the phone as its being developed. I’ve been trying to get funding to buy phones – no success yet!

http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/learn/setup/phone.html gives a list of compatible phones. There’s also a spreadsheet showing others phones that have been used on the app inventor website.

Phones and tablets can now be connected wirelessly http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/blogs/andrew/2012/12/app-inventor-goes-wireless.html

Pauline

[auchteach]

16/01/2013 at 6:45 pm

Here’s the link for spreadsheet with list of phones https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgIdRCXI87uXdEZxR0ppRGZkNENpbDZuQnY3a0wyenc

Pauline

[mcgivernj]

16/01/2013 at 8:06 pm

Can anyone comment on the phones that they have purchased?
Namely, what type are they, where did you get them and how much did they cost?
Looking for dirt cheap cheap. DIRT cheap. After all, the sole purpose of the device will be for the teaching of this and related units.

John

[ianking]

16/01/2013 at 8:22 pm

I bought Samsung Galaxy Ace on 3 phones from Carphone Warehouse. Last year they were £100 but you had to buy £15 talk time (this soon ran out, but you don’t need it anyway)

I also bought 2 Samsung 7″ tablets which cost a little over £100 from John Lewis. Both work with the same drivers

[Lorraine Muir]

16/01/2013 at 9:35 pm

We have been working through the App Inventor materials for a couple of weeks. Is anyone else having problems trying to test on phones or tablets, we continually get the App Inventor server error. It is just lucky when it works. It’s starting to frustrate the kids.

[Jeremy Scott]

19/01/2013 at 8:04 pm

Gareth,

Thanks for the kind words about the materials. I’ve used the following without a problem:

Huawei Ascend G300
Alcatel (can’t recall the model)
Samsung Galaxy Y
Samsung Galaxy Ace
Samsung Galaxy SII
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2

I’ve also seen several phones from different manufacturers work via the WiFi link (see Pauline’s post). In short, I’ve not yet tried a phone that didn’t work.

Lorraine – the only time we’ve had that error is when we’ve had connectivity problems in school. We’ve been using App Inventor over the last several weeks and, apart from when our Internet connection dropped when work was being done to the proxy, things have been rock solid. I’d therefore suggest that your network connection and/or proxy may be the culprit. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to App Inventor from home (or get your pupils to do the same) to see if you can replicate it away from school.

Regards,
Jeremy

[Mrs Janet McDonald]

23/01/2013 at 3:47 pm

We bought Vodafone’s own brand “Smart” smartphones – we got them cheap (£40 each) because they were end of line (Vodafone now have the “Smart II”!). Everything has worked fine on them and the kids really responded to seeing things working on a “real” phone rather than just the emulator. We’ve also been able to get apps running on an Acer Android tablet.

I would recommend watching out for end of lines like this or trying ebay where you can buy lots of cheap smartphones.

[Gareth Rae]

24/01/2013 at 4:28 pm

Thanks everyone for your replies, much appreciated. I eventually went for a Zoostorm 7″ Tablet running Android 4.0. It appeared good value at £74.41 from CPC. We can only use suppliers on our Local authority system to spend our budget, so was fairly restricted by this. The good thing is, a number of our pupils have Android smart phones, some of which are mentioned above, so they can download onto them.

I will repost how we get on with the Zoostorm.

[Jeremy Scott]

25/01/2013 at 10:40 am

Gareth,

If you can get it working on your school network, App Inventor now permits testing and download to phones via WiFi, eliminating the need for Windows drivers. This would certainly make it easier for pupils to use their own Android phones.

Regards,
Jeremy

[Gareth Rae]

31/01/2013 at 4:37 pm

Our test of Virtual Pet is working a treat on our new Zoostorm tablets! Pupils looking forward to getting underway with developing their apps.

We will look into WiFi downloading Jeremy.

Our classes are setting up Google Accounts using their school email address. This is to ensure if they forget their password it can be reset via their school email, as external mail accounts cannot be accessed by our school systems. This should ensure I don’t have a pupil(s) sitting for a period doing nothing because they have forgotten their password. Everything was goiing fairly well until today when they were asked to authenticate via text (a code sent to their mobile, there are still some who don’t have one!) or voicemail. Most others I have set accounts up with have been asked to authenticate their account via email. Why can’t they all be via email? Does google do this randomly and use different authentication methods for security purposes? On the whole there was not a problem with text authentication, but a pupil today had a message “this mobile number has already been registered against another account”. So couldn’t get authenticated and log in! (asked him to try his personal home account, but guess what, he had forgotten his password!)

Why can Google just get them to authenticate via email!!! Or I suppose why don’t pupils just remember passwords – easier said than done.

Has anyone else had to authenticate via different methods?

[ianking]

31/01/2013 at 5:33 pm

I think Google does this if there are a lot of new accounts form the one IP address. One solution would be to get them to set up a gmail account via GLEW

[Gareth Rae]

04/02/2013 at 10:44 am

Thanks Ian, I will look into this.

[Lorraine Muir]

22/02/2013 at 10:28 pm

Found the problem causing server error code. If a previous pupil has been testing on device go onto appinventor on device and make sure previous user gets logged out. This sorts the problem!

[pliddle34]

28/02/2013 at 8:11 pm

Fife experience:

Could make accounts for pupil in school (blocked). Google phone verification and text verification kicked in when registering accounts. There are ways round it but it’s fiddly! Made 20 accounts (enough to go between two classes as kids have own google accounts too)

App inventor emulator works great though is a tad slow. Instead of messing with drivers or wifi, just use the barcode option in the package menu. Then all the kids do is download QR Droid (free) and scan the screen to download – also means their pals can download their app really quickly.. saved us from putting drivers on the machines.

I had made up a version of App Inventor that worked locally, but it wasn’t worth the hassle once we had the Google accounts working ok.