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Serverless VS MIT App Inventor

Compare Serverless VS MIT App Inventor and see what are their differences

Serverless logo Serverless

Toolkit for building serverless applications

MIT App Inventor logo MIT App Inventor

App Inventor is a cloud-based tool, which means you can create apps for phones or tablets right in your web browser.
  • Serverless Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-06
  • MIT App Inventor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

Serverless features and specs

  • Scalability
    Serverless architectures can automatically scale up or down based on the traffic, without the need for manual intervention.
  • Cost Efficiency
    You only pay for what you use. There are no expenses for idle times because billing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by your application.
  • Reduced Maintenance
    No need to manage, patch, update, or monitor servers. This allows focus on writing code and deploying features.
  • Speed of Development
    Serverless platforms provide built-in integration with other services, which makes it quicker to develop and deploy applications.
  • High Availability
    Serverless platforms typically offer high availability and fault tolerance out of the box, reducing the risk of downtime.

Possible disadvantages of Serverless

  • Cold Start Latency
    Serverless functions can suffer from higher latency during initial invocation or when they haven’t been used for a while.
  • Limited Execution Time
    Most serverless platforms impose a maximum execution time limit on functions, which may not be suitable for long-running applications.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Serverless architectures often rely on the specific features and services of a cloud provider, which can make it difficult to switch providers.
  • Complexity in Debugging
    Debugging and monitoring serverless applications can be more challenging compared to traditional architectures, due to their distributed and ephemeral nature.
  • Security Concerns
    Sharing resources on a serverless platform can introduce security vulnerabilities that must be managed vigilantly.

MIT App Inventor features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    MIT App Inventor offers a drag-and-drop interface, making it accessible for beginners and non-programmers to create mobile applications without writing code.
  • Educational Value
    The platform is designed to teach the fundamentals of programming and computational thinking, which makes it an excellent tool for educators and students.
  • Cloud-Based
    Projects are stored in the cloud, allowing users to access their work from any device with internet connectivity.
  • Extensive Resources
    A wealth of tutorials, guides, and community forums are available to help users learn and troubleshoot.
  • Rapid Prototyping
    The platform enables quick development and testing of app prototypes, which is useful for iterative design processes.
  • Real-Time Testing
    Real-time testing on connected devices speeds up the development cycle by providing immediate feedback.

Possible disadvantages of MIT App Inventor

  • Limited Functionality
    Advanced features and custom functionality can be difficult or impossible to implement due to the platform's limitations.
  • Performance Issues
    Apps created with MIT App Inventor may not be as optimized or performant as those developed with more complex programming environments.
  • Dependency on Internet
    Since it is a cloud-based tool, a stable internet connection is required to access services, which might be a constraint in some situations.
  • Basic User Interface Design
    The drag-and-drop interface may lead to less polished or professional UI/UX compared to apps designed with dedicated design tools.
  • Limited Platform Support
    Primarily supports Android development, which might be a downside for those looking to develop iOS applications.
  • Learning Curve for Complex Apps
    While it is user-friendly for simple applications, creating more complex apps can still require a significant amount of learning and problem-solving.

Serverless videos

Thoughts on Zero V3, Instant Page and Serverless 1.37!

MIT App Inventor videos

MIT App Inventor: Mobile Apps. Built by You.

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to Send Data to a Google Sheet with MIT App Inventor
  • Review - Thunkable Vs AppyBuilder Vs Makroid Vs MIT App Inventor ||difference||
  • Tutorial - Create First App in MIT App Inventor 2

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Serverless and MIT App Inventor)
Developer Tools
60 60%
40% 40
IDE
0 0%
100% 100
Open Source
100 100%
0% 0
Application Builder
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Serverless and MIT App Inventor

Serverless Reviews

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MIT App Inventor Reviews

Top 10 Android Studio Alternatives For App Development
MIT App Inventor is a visual programming environment which is developed by Google. It allows users to build apps for tablets and smartphones.
Top 5 App Builder To Build Your Own App Without Coding
Undoubtedly, Kodular has been the best app builder in recent years. It was founded on 6 July 2017 by the partnership of 7 people such as Conor shipp, Vishwas Adiga, Pavitra Golchha, Sander Jochems, Sivagiri Visakan, and Diego Barreiro. It is a Builder based on the MIT App inventor. You can make your apps on this platform without any charges. Everything is 100% free in this...
THE BEST 34 APP DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE IN 2022 LIST
AppInventor.org is a site for learning and teaching how to program mobile apps with MIT’s App Inventor. These tutorials are refined versions of the tutorials that have been on the Google and MIT App Inventor sites from App Inventor’s inception– thousands of beginners have used them to learn programming and learn App Inventor.
Best Mobile App Development Tools for Kids
MIT App Inventor is a web application integrated development environment originally provided by Google and now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It allows newcomers to computer programming to create application software(apps) for two operating systems (OS): Android, and iOS. It is free and open-source software released under dual licensing.
Source: codinghero.ai
10 Best Android Studio Alternatives For App Development
Thunkable is a powerful drag and drops app builder. And this is made by two of the very first MIT engineers on the MIT app inventor. The platform is geared for the most professional users, who may want higher quality and robust apps for their business, community or just for themselves. Thus, Thunkable has an amazingly active and engaged community. And it also offers live...
Source: techdator.net

Social recommendations and mentions

MIT App Inventor might be a bit more popular than Serverless. We know about 41 links to it since March 2021 and only 39 links to Serverless. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Serverless mentions (39)

  • Show HN: Winglang – a new Cloud-Oriented programming language
    GP may have been referring to Serverless Framework (http://serverless.com//). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Invocation error - can't find any results helping me to solve this issue
    I deployed a lambda and http api gateway using a serverless.com (sls) template as a start. I get the following error when it processes a specific request:. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Deploying Lambdas from Zipped Code on S3 vs Image Repository
    Have you tried serverless.com ? It lets you have infrastructure as code. Source: about 2 years ago
  • [p] I built an open source platform to deploy computationally intensive Python functions as serverless jobs, with no timeouts
    - With Lambda, you manage creating and building the container yourself, as well as updating the Lambda function code. There are tools out there such as sst or serverless.com which help streamline this. Source: over 2 years ago
  • AWS Lambda, a good host for a rest API?
    If you'd like to use Lambda, usually you need to engineer FOR it, from day one, you don't (often) get to choose some other framework and shoehorn it into Lambda and Serverless. There's some great frameworks to help deploy code into Lambda easily and create REST endpoints for things, one such frameworks is serverless.com that helps easily deploy to it, but it lacks a framework for doing REST that also supports... Source: over 2 years ago
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MIT App Inventor mentions (41)

  • Awesome-no-code-tools
    App Inventor - Create powerful Android apps without code using blocs coding. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Looking for savable graphing methods
    First thought, play with MIT App Inventor https://appinventor.mit.edu/, they have dedicated blocks for graphing and cross-platform implementations of Bluetooth for Android and iOS. The data format is still up to you. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • App for recording time periods
    Or you could go to https://appinventor.mit.edu/ and design your own custom app (no widget, though). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Easiest code to learn to make an app?
    If you want to make a mobile app you could try https://appinventor.mit.edu/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Trying to have a Ubuntu server I can turn on from my phone, log in as user, and start the Docker containers for my server. How do I automate this process?
    Maybe a raspberry pi that's on 24/7 connected to wifi and use that to send the wake over lan signal to the server? Arduino on the power pins also works, I did something quite similar but with a Bluetooth board, the code was really simple I just made an Android app with MIT app inventor that sent a signal to the hc_05 bt board, once the Arduino received that signal it shorted the power pin to 5v for half a second... Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Serverless and MIT App Inventor, you can also consider the following products

Nimbella - Simple serverless cloud for developers

Thunkable - Powerful but easy to use, drag-and-drop mobile app builder.

Webiny - The Enterprise CMS platform that you can host on your cloud

Kodular - Much more than a modern app creator without coding

Up by apex - Deploy serverless apps and APIs in seconds to AWS Lambda

Android Studio - Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA