Google is bringing Android software development to the masses.

The company unveiled a tool Monday that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smart phones.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth-graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cell phones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smart phone software market. Its leading rival, Apple, takes a more tightly managed approach to application development for the iPhone, controlling the software and vetting the programs available.

“We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” Abelson said.

Abelson is a longtime proponent of making intellectual and scientific resources more open. He is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Creative Commons, and he helped initiate MIT’s OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online course materials used in teaching the university’s classes.

The Google project, Abelson said, is intended to give users, especially young people, a simple tool to let them tinker with smart phone software, much as people have done with computers. Over the years, he noted, simplified programming tools like Basic, Logo and Scratch have opened the door to innovations of all kinds. Microsoft’s first product, for example, was a version of Basic, pared down to run on personal computers.

The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different smart phone capabilities — and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. The result is an application on that person’s smart phone.

The Google tool, of course, works only for phones running Android software.

A sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. The tool is Web-based except for a small software download that automatically syncs the programs created on a personal computer, connected to the application inventor website, with an Android smart phone. When making programs, the phone must be connected to a computer with a USB link.