Jailbroken iPhones have had this capability for years...not to say iOS is better, just that I'd expected this would happen...sooner?
That said, the Python distro on iOS is only 2.6-ish, not even 2.7, and there's no 3.x release there. It's not very useful but I guess I did use it a lot for learning back then.
Kivy for Android has been around awhile as well.
It remains to be seen if we can adopt a concurrent model for some aspects of the main application thread(s). Going concurrent almost surely means more Cython and more speed. I'm interested if anyone has any ideas about using CPython to reduce the cost of certain nearly-always-performed functions to grease the event system. Not that it's slow, but fast is always better =)
Honestly, I have no idea. But I'm aware that there are multiple efforts to bring "sane" languages (such as C#, by Xamarin) to Android, others than Java.
> Jailbroken iPhones have had this capability for years
I had no idea about this one, but I don't follow iOS development either.
> I'd expected this would happen...sooner?
I agree with you, but I believe this sort of thing should be backed by Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) themselves.
[EDIT]: formatting
On the other hand, if Google or Apple backed a high-level scripting language like Python, that could also lead to security concerns, but I would feel safer with that than something like C on my mobile device.
Unintentional security mistakes are much, much easier to make in C than most other languages.
EDIT: Sorry if this came off as a little harsh, but I guess I'm curious as to what you think the security advantages of C over python are, when everything I've heard says the opposite.
I'm well aware that, e.g. a buffer overflow is something you'd want to worry about in writing C code. I guess I worded my comment strangely? I said I would "rather have that" than C, to which I was referring to a high level language like Python.
As have non-jailbroken ones. I have Python for iOS and Pythonista (my preferred favorite) from the App Store. Python for iOS even comes in a 3.2 flavor.
In fact, you don't even need a Java decompiler to do this. All you need is a backwords Java compiler. That is, one that treats bytecode as a source languages and compiles down to Java. This is a much easier process because (ignoring things like Enums) you don't need to try and figure out what the original code is, and instead can just do a naive decompile with optimization passes.
I know there's a maintained JRuby project[1] for Android though.