This is great! Google acknowledges that the visual programming environment is closely related to Scratch, a visual programming environment that works brilliantly on desktop computers.
http://scratch.mit.edu/

I've always thought that Scratch would be a great way to program phones, so if Google does a nice job of this I'll consider Android when I need to replace my phone.

Scratch itself is written in Smalltalk, otherwise I'm sure we'd have seen it ported to mobile devices before now.

Try this link http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

It will be interesting to see how much App Inventor allows you to do.

MattDavid:

The docs are already up:
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/

App inventor allows you to play music, display images, perform computations, animate sprites, detect collisions, play videos, access the phone's contacts list, create and manipulate lists, store data to a simple database, dial the phone, send an SMS, interact with twitter, read the accelerometer, read the GPS, determine the phone's orientation, scan barcodes, open the camera app, load a web page, perform a web search, open Google Maps, display alerts, append to a log file, convert text to speech, use the phone's speech-to-text detection. In the "coming soon" list are things like a game client, web database and voting system.

So I think the limiting factor will be human creativity rather than what App Inventor allows you to do.

you have to submit a form to get approval to use it :'(

Google releases many of their new products by application only, i.e. you have to submit a form. When the product is more robust and polished, they open it up for wider use.

I submitted a form a couple of days ago, but haven't heard back. The questions on the form suggest that Google wants to see this used widely to teach software development in the classroom.

I can't think of a better software platform to teach programming to high school students.