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Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had a lot of experience with another similar library, Kivy (kivy.org). These types of libraries, can be quite effective for the right use case. I shipped a couple mobile apps on both Google and Apple, so there’s that. I would check this out, but I do remember having to work through a lot of issues to get the mobile build just right. I wonder if a less mature project like this would have similar struggles?

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I too have used Kivy, using Buildozer for Android builds. One day I did something trivial like change the color of a button. The otherwise untouched project suddenly refused to build for random obscure Buildozer-related reasons I quickly lost the patience to figure out. Imagine if it was a security vulnerability I was trying to quickly patch. What's more, I think even rebuilding with the untouched source also failed now in the same way. And that's how I lost interest in pursuing Kivy further.

Yep. Kivy was a big part of my journey to usually wanting nothing to do with any niche or obscure tech.

It took me a long time to learn that no matter how awesome the concept seems, if it's not extremely popular (aside from very simple things) there's probably an issue somewhere.

At this point I would rather just make web apps for most everything, and I wish they'd just merge android and ChromeOS so we had an easy way to make simple cross platform stuff, while keeping the Android APIs for more powerful stuff.

This isn't intended as a dig at you, but in what world should an "Install Kivy" page take ~10 screens of text to display? If my goal is to build a simple Python app I can give to my friends and say, "here, I made this, give it a try," then that install page is screaming at me not to use Kivy to do that.

https://kivy.org/doc/stable/gettingstarted/installation.html

I'll add: the "getting started" collection of pages where I found that "install kivy" monstrosity then goes on to an "A first app" page, which...doesn't walk you through building your first app. Instead, it links to a page in a different collection of pages. And that page describes how to build a Pong app (too complex to be a "build my first app" -- there's a reason to start with "Hello World")...except it doesn't, it says that it assumes you already know how to create a Kivy application, and refers you to another page if you don't. And that page does "Hello World, but poorly.

Okay, one more and I'll shut up. The app is unsigned (on MacOS) so you can't double-click or command-O it -- you therefore have to right-click and select Open, and then acknowledge the dire warning about running unsigned code. I don't see any mention of this on the over-long install page, so anyone who doesn't know how to run unsigned code on a Mac is out of the game immediately.

And after all that, the app doesn't run. So yeah.

I put off learning python for years because of this ridiculousness. Finally I decided to just bite the bullet, because it just isn't getting any better.

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