Last month, Google announced that they are closing Google Labs in an effort to streamline their products. They did, however, say that they will not shut down every Labs experiment. One of the Labs experiment that I was hoping that they will continue is the Android App Inventor.

Google's App inventor is an application which allows users to make Android apps using only drag-and-drop elements. Making an Android app requires little or no programming knowledge. Users only have to define the behavior of blocks that make up the app.

Well there is both good news and bad news regarding the Android App Inventor. The bad news is that Google is discontinuing the Android App Inventor. Google has announced that the App Inventor will be closed within the next 90 days.

The good news is that Google is releasing the source code of App Inventor. This will ensure that the project never really dies. It might even make App Inventor even better.

With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform.

As a result of these changes App Inventor will be available through the end of the year but users should expect the current App Inventor URL, to change sometime in the next 90 days.

[source: Google Labs via: Phandroid]