[Mobile-sig] python on android

[Fetchinson .]

Hi all,

First of all thanks a lot for creating this mailing list. I sent the
original mail to python-ideas [1] referenced by Jeff on meta-sig [2].
My perspective is that of a developer of python programs (mostly hobby
projects) and not developer of python itself.

What I'd like to see is a python distribution for android (I'm aware
of the fact that this is mobile-sig and not android-sig, but for me
personally android matters a lot more than other mobile platforms)
that is as reliable as the linux/macos/windows distributions released
by the python core dev team. Ideally, each time a new python version
is released not only linux/macos/windows installers should be
available on python.org but also android probably in the form of an
installable apk. And just as there are platform specific features for
e.g. windows that are not available on linux, there of course would be
android-only features in the android distribution like hardware
related libraries like camera, gps, accelerator, etc. sensors and
probably more.

Currently there is no single officially blessed (i.e. psf blessed)
python distribution for android. There are various approaches, kivy
[3], sl4a [4] and more [5]. But these are either dead projects or
accomplish much more than a vanilla python distribution. What I'd like
to see is an environment whose goal is to be "just" the python core
plus about as much platform specific feature as there are for the
others, linux/macos/windows.

Of course the whole enterprise depends on the willingness of core
python dev folks to dedicate time and energy to maintaining a code
base that one can compile for android also which is not a small feat.
I'm not sure they have this time and energy and I of course wouldn't
blame them, this is open source, people do it in their free time.

I merely would like to gauge the community's interest in something
like this. Maybe if many users show interest then the core python dev
folks can be convinced that this would be a worthy effort.

Cheers,
Daniel


[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-December/030490.html
[2] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/meta-sig/2015-January/001412.html
[3] http://kivy.org/
[4] https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a
[5] https://github.com/pybee/Python-Android-support


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