
An update on Python-for-android: v2019.06.06 released and future plans - inclemnet
http://inclem.net/2019/06/08/kivy/an_update_on_python_for_android/
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monkmartinez
I really like Python... it is fun to program with and has a decent library for
just about anything you can imagine.

However, I would really like a Flutter like UI experience for Python. More
concretely, Python would rule the world if it had a modern cross platform
framework upon which to build graphical interfaces for all the devices we see
today. From iOS to Android to RasPi to Google Home to anything with a screen.

Kivy and the Beeware project are just too janky to really accomplish anything.
No offense intended to the creators or maintainers. The complexity to get
anything out there is just too much.

I have been looking at Flutter/Dart and React/JS to fill this gap. Also,
thinking about possibly learning Swift. My logic, Python seems like it is
going down the ML rabbit hole with no signs of abatement... I don't know what
that means for long term adoption.

If Swift, Dart, Kotlin and JS can tap into the same ML pipelines, I don't see
the benefit of Python in the long run. I mean a Pandas library for anyone of
the languages mentioned above would be a game changer for ML adoption in that
language, imo.

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hackskills
Mobile apps written in Python might be too slow though.

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tshirtman
Too slow for what? How slow do you think python is? unless your application is
cpu-bound (which it probably isn't), python is fast enough for basically
anything you might want to do these days, and if it is, you can use cython to
optimize the parts that needs to be fast, as kivy does.

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murphy214
While a lot can be done in kivy, I foolishly decided to try it out with
absolutely no primer on java, android or native development in general.

It was ok, everything felt like it had to be hacked together, and for some
reason the only working version I could get stuff to compile in was like
android SDK 19 and ndk 14b I think? (you literally had to thread the needle
with your envs) At the time I don't know if they actually had a working
buildozer env for 64-bit ARM.(could be wrong on that) Compiling took forever,
especially the first time, which 99% of the time I couldn't get any 64-bit
version of anything to compile so nothing was cached. I'd change one config
wait 10 minutes come back not ideal.

Again I was probably super naive in my approach, but overall it felt very
constraining and not the java is a peach but I was much more comfortable
learning java (from scratch) and android than wading through kivy.

I appreciate the developers contributions, and I'm probably at fault, but I'm
just saying its worth noting it wasn't any easier getting an app running if
you know just python with kivy. I've also come to realize gradle and android
are just a huge bloated mess in general lol.

As a side note cross compiling packages in go for use on android does work
really good for stuff like daemons.

