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It uses cython, which means "Python compiled to C"

http://cython.org/ https://github.com/kivy/kivy-ios

So the end to end build is not yet available out of the box?

There's a tutorial which looks slightly old: http://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html

If Kivy wants to become "the primary Python for iOS" rather than just "yet another cross-platform Python implementation which nobody uses for serious iOS projects", they have to nail packaging more convincingly.

You should be able to make iOS apps with Python. Plenty of iOS apps have interpreters. You just can't download and run code from the net.

(See, for example, Codea which lets you write and run Lua programs right on the iPad. There are similar Python systems there.)

We embed the python interpreter with your python app inside an iOS app. Then, we have a bootstrap in objective-c that start the interpreter on your main.py file. ProcessCraft and Deflectouch are made with this approach, and are available on the app store :)