I got interested in APEs because I got lost in DLL hell a few times with PyInstaller lol. IMO PyInstaller is pretty cool, but a bit overkill sometimes. At present I find APE Python a perfect match for one big use case (a bunch of my thrown-together shell utilities I can take and use everywhere).

Like after I wrote this blog post, I wrote a small Python app using Flask/SQLite/D3.js, put everything in a single file, just copied it onto computers with Debian/Fedora/FreeBSD/Win10, and now I just access the info I need on those systems via the browser. Providing a browser GUI makes it easier for my colleagues as well, some of whom don't use terminals at all :)

For C extensions (where I've stubbed my toes quite a bit with PyInstaller), I think a nice goal with APE Python would be to have a website like Christoph Gohlke's (https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/), where you just select the packages you would like, and you download them compiled as a single-file executable you can use anywhere. This is an interesting problem, and there's been some work towards solving it, let's see if we can have an elegant solution.