Using App Inventor with several people sharing a single account

[Hal Abelson]

Last week, we made a change to App Inventor 2 that imposed the restriction that two or more people cannot use App Inventor from the same Google account at the same time.   We did this because simultaneous multiple use of a single account can lead to projects being damaged and blocks being lost.

We recommend that people using App Inventor have individual login accounts.

One the other hand, we recognize that using individual login accounts might not always be possible or convenient.   For example, we've heard from teachers who prefer to create a small number of accounts, each shared by several students.   We don't recommend this, but we also don't want to force people to change their way of working in the middle of the school year.

So we've just distributed a further change to App Inventor 2 that allows people to bypass the single user restriction.  Here's how it works:

If you are using App Inventor and there is another login to App Inventor from the same Google account, you will get an alert that your App Inventor session is out of date.   At that point, you can choose:

- to stop your  session
- to make your session the current one, which will make the other session out of date
- to continue with both sessions

Be aware that if you continue with both sessions, there is a danger that your blocks may be lost.   People working in this mode should frequently export their projects to their personal computer so that there will be backup copies, not on the App Inventor server, from which a project can be retrieved in case of problems.

We plan to relax this restriction in the next few weeks to let two or more people use App Inventor from the same account provided they are working on different projects.

== Hal

[Rachel Wilkins Patel]

We would appreciate being able to use appinventor for classroom if students could work on separate projects under one account.  It's difficult to setup and maintain accounts for minors. 

[Hal Abelson]

The announcement I posted on March 29 in this thread is still in effect.


We've not implemented the relaxed restriction (as I'd written) that lets people work on separate projects without interference.   So people should just bypass the warning that comes up and choose to continue with both sessions.

But be very careful that different people do not work on the same project at the same time.

[Armo]

I'd rather we didn't use Google accounts at all.  Why did you implement it in this way? and are there alternatives to using Google accounts?