Beeware – Android and iOS Apps in Python | Hacker News Reader

Beeware – Android and iOS Apps in Python

beeware.org

156 pointsNaac25 comments

Here's a project the Beware team built, there's an iOS version built from the same source too

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keith_mage...

Also a note re their platform compatibility, it's not just Android and iOS: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web, and tvOS

Looks very interesting, going to give it a go adding guis to some existing cli python toys I've built

Here’s the iOS version.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/travel-tips/id1336372310

Looks pretty miserable. Are there any proper example applications or is this more of a toy framework?

Sorry to play the bad boy here.

But we have 2020 these 2 Apps (Android and iOS) are looking like websites from the 90s.

I don't get the point why everyone wants to add a framework to write one codebase and deploy on many platforms.

There are great working frameworks out here why we need the 100 framework doing this?

the last line of the comment you replied to gave a pretty good example: If you have tools build in tech X and just want to wrap them in a UI to make them usable on a phone. (similar to how Python ships with Tk bindings for UI: no, its not pretty, but it's an UI and thats what you want sometimes, without learning something big or worse a different tech stack)

> Looks very interesting, going to give it a go adding guis to some existing cli python toys I've built

and your python cli you want as bundled iOS/Android app? I don't buy it.

But anyway everyone has different problems and if this 1000 framework is solving this, congrats :clap:

Because everyone wants their preferred set of tools/languages to do it using the design patterns they like and there is nothing wrong with that. I don't see myself using Beeware ever really but that doesn't mean people shouldn't work on it.

Because if I can compile an iOS app in Python I don't need to give Apple (as much) money.

I mean, you’d still need to give them money for the dev tools if you happen upon some iOS specific bug.

In comparison to Python-for-Android with Kivy, the main thing that jumps out at me is the use of native UI (Kivy has its own UI, with KivyMD for Material Design theme).

Is it possible to use Python libraries with C dependencies (it's possible with P4A if there is the suitable recipe)?

What about the starting time compared to native apps?

Is it possible to run a Python service in the background?

Is there any collaboration done/possible with the great work made by Kivy team (Python-for-Android, Plyer, PyJNIus, etc)?

This is very interesting for someone who'd like to casually create a few apps on android for quality of life, but knows only Python and isn't interested in branching further.

1) how mature is the tool?

2) are there any established alternatives that this project is challenging?

On 2, Kivy [0] leaps to mind as a fairly mature cross-platform Python framework that covers iOS and Android. But like most of these things has a few rough edges.

There's also PySide for Android [1], which is also fairly mature but is... Much rougher. With a higher learning curve. And less iOS focused.

[0] https://github.com/kivy/kivy/

[1] https://wiki.qt.io/PySide_for_Android_guide

Sadly there are no good alternative to PyS60 (Python for Symbian S60) for Android yet.

Looks like it depends on what you call "mature".

I just downloaded the example app called Travel Tips, and I get unreadable buttons and text because out-of-the-box, it apparently doesn't support dark mode.

When I turn it on, I get unequal padding between boxes and no native pickers, just a picker at the bottom of the iPhone.

When I run it on iPad, it boxes the content (two black bars left and right. The interface is simply stretched up, without regard for the huge space that the iPad offers.

Font sizes do not adjust with iOS settings, even if you restart the app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/travel-tips/id1336372310

) // closing bracket

This looks really good to be honest. So many projects I would have loved to create GUI's for and distribute that way but the overhead of having to sort out dependencies and packaging make it not feasible.

Does anyone have experience using this for their apps?

You can find an old example here:

https://github.com/eliasdorneles/tictactoe-voc

Looks like this was back when beeware was using VOC, which AFAICT is no longer being used.

I've been trying to find more recent examples but it doesn't look like there are many public projects using beeware.

Beeware / Beware, not sure about that name!

How does this compare to kivy ?

Answered:

https://dbader.org/blog/python-mobile-development-kivy-vs-be...

Excerpt:

The key difference between Kivy and BeeWare is that BeeWare programs use the native UI toolkit of the platform they run on, whereas Kivy apps use a custom UI toolkit that uses the same controls across all platforms.

Cool, that sounds like the difference between react-native and flutter

Looks awesome, will give it a go.

Well if I can quickly translate my small personal use app ideas to Android using this, then this is gold for me.

Thank you for this. I'll try it out and let you know how far I could get.

Same for me!

tifadg1 sums up my use case nicely: > This is very interesting for someone who'd like to casually create a few apps on android for quality of life, but knows only Python and isn't interested in branching further.

I have some little python utilities that I’d love to have an iOS GUI wrapper for, but not enough to pay the $99 and learn something new.

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