I downloaded the App Inventor Companion from the App Store and tried entering the connection code shown, but the app doesn’t load.
Is it actually possible to test the app directly on the same iPad, or is there a limitation with this setup?
Hey! I had a similar setup where I was using MIT App Inventor on Safari and wanted to test the iPad app on the device itself. What tripped me up was the network.
Both the iPad and the App Inventor Companion need to be on the same local network. If you’re using a hotspot or switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data, it can block the communication.
Once I ensured both the App Inventor website in Safari and the Companion app were on the same stable Wi-Fi, the live test started working just fine.
In my experience, it’s tricky. MIT App Inventor wasn’t fully reliable when I tried to test the iPad app on the device.
The companion app has limited support on iOS compared to Android, mostly because iOS has stricter sandboxing and doesn’t allow the same kind of dynamic code execution.
What I ended up doing was developing the core app logic on the iPad, then switching to an Android phone or emulator for actual testing. Not ideal, but it saved me from a lot of debugging headaches.
Yeah, I’ve run into that too. When I couldn’t get the live test to work on the same iPad, I switched to using the built-in emulator from App Inventor’s browser view as a fallback.
Not perfect, but it let me keep iterating without being blocked. I later deployed the app to an Android device for real-world behaviour.
iOS testing remains a bit shaky with App Inventor, so while you can technically test the iPad app on device, it’s hit or miss unless everything is configured just right.