Mark Friedman, Cofounder of App Inventor, Joins Thunkable!
Welcome Mark!
We couldn’t be happier to announce that Mark Friedman — the original cofounder of App Inventor — has joined Thunkable as the VP of Engineering.
Mark will focus on building out Thunkable’s engineering team, expanding all sorts of product features and launching app building for iOS.
I hope you brought your app-etite, because we sat down with Mark to discuss a full plate of thunktastic questions.
Can you tell us where the idea for App Inventor/Thunkable originally came from?
It was 2008 and I was working for Google on the Android team.
We were developing what would become the Google Play Store. As an experienced software and mobile app developer, I started to realize that even for someone with my background, it was very challenging to build a mobile app. Even building a simple app was surprisingly hard.
I started to think that there had to be an easier way to do this. There had to be a way we could make it so that even my son — who was in elementary school — would be able to build an app.
At the same time, Professor Hal Abelson of MIT was a visiting faculty member at Google. I had previously worked for Hal when I was a research scientist at MIT in the early 90’s, and was working on developing the programming language known as Scheme.
When Hal came to Google during the summer of 2008, we discussed how difficult mobile app development was and how we should create a way to reduce the friction of building apps. We decided to collaborate on a simple drag and drop tool known as “Young Android”, to allow anyone to build native mobile android apps without writing a single line of code.
Google fully supported our vision.
Young Android eventually became known as App Inventor and officially became a project within Google Labs. At Google, Hal and I grew the App Inventor team to 12 people. A few years later, Google Labs was shut down and we decided to open source App Inventor and transfer everything to Hal’s lab at MIT, where it has continued to flourish and grow.
By of the end of 2015, App Inventor had become the world’s largest platform for non-developers to build native mobile apps.
How did you meet Thunkable founders, Arun and Wei?
Arun and I first met when he interned at Google during his sophomore year at MIT, while I was still running the App Inventor team. After MIT took over App Inventor, Hal began building the team at MIT with a number of people including Andrew McKinney, Jeff Schiller, Josh Sheldon and Marisol Diaz. Arun and Wei were the first two student engineers to join the App Inventor team. I continued to support App Inventor from the Google side and had the opportunity to work with Arun and Wei on further development of the platform.
One of the coolest features on Thunkable is Live Development, which allows you to test your app in real-time on your phone. Where did this feature come from?
It was a combination of experience and serendipity. In the past I had spent a lot of time developing with the programming language Scheme.
Scheme — like many dynamic programming languages — has something known as a REPL (i.e. “read, evaluate, print, loop”).
What this means is that at any point during development of a program, you can just enter in an expression or statement in that programming language, have it execute and print out the results.
While developing App Inventor, I wanted to debug some of my Scheme code. I was trying to figure out how to get a REPL inside of App Inventor on my mobile phone so I could test it. I managed to cobble together something which allowed me to enter code on my laptop, have it sent to a REPL on my phone and see the results. After getting this working, I had a thought that we could extend this concept and allow App Inventor itself (and later Thunkable) to interact with the running app on the phone.
So rather than just me using it for debugging my code, we wrote it so that all changes made within App Inventor would be sent to the phone.
Hence, Live Development!
With this feature, as you make changes to your app on Thunkable, your phone displays changes in real-time. Additionally, you can right-click on any of your blocks in the editor, select “Do It” and have that block get executed immediately on your phone.
You can even get the current values of variables, properties and block computations!
What excites you most about Thunkable?
I love the idea of transforming passive consumers of technology into active developers! Many first-time Thunkable users don’t think they will ever have the power to build their own app. But once they get started, they get super excited — and that gets me excited.
I love being able to give people the ability and tools to take power over their technological lives.
The other thing I am most excited about is to take this beyond what Google and MIT could do as a research project.
We are going to build out more interesting and useful features to allow individuals, communities and companies to build more beautiful and complex apps!
Since this project started at Google, it was Android only. I am also very excited that we will soon be launching Thunkable for iOS.
What advice do you have for first-time developers just getting started on Thunkable?
Leverage the Thunkable community (community.thunkable.com).
What has always amazed me most is the willingness of every Thunkable user to help others. If you get stuck, need help coming up with ideas or just sharing your successes, our community is the place is go. And just feel free to experiment, play around, and try things! Live Development is a great way to just see what various blocks do, before you even have a real app.
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I’m excited, Mark is excited and the entire team is excited as we focus on the global expansion of commercial app building!
In the words of Daft Punk, Thunkable just got better, faster, stronger.
Thanks for reading and stay posted for more announcements :) If you have any questions for Mark, leave a comment below or email us at hello@thunkable.com!
