LEGO MINDSTORMS Inventor app not installing

[Ivan]

We're having a hard time having the LEGO MINDSTORMS Inventor app show up for chromebooks. It's set for 'Allow Install' but it doesn't show up for users. Does anyone else use this app (there's been mention that it's being discontinued eventually, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not at this point).

If it is discontinued, is SPIKE LEGO Education the next best alternative? Thank you.

[Josh]

We had similar issues with the Mindstorms Android app last year. From memory it was something to do with a change in how the apps needed to be packaged for the newer Android versions.

I reached out to Lego and got no where with it, they basically said that Mindstorms were end of life and implied it wouldn't be fixed.

After some searching I ended up recommending Mindstorms Makecode to our teachers. I havn't had much feedback, so unsure how successful they were with it in the end but it seemed to work when I tested it.

I found that I had to use the beta version of the site that contained several bug fixes for the Bluetooth connection. I also had to firmware update our Mindstorms to a newer version which was fairly straight forward.

https://makecode.mindstorms.com/beta