Comment by saintfiends | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saintfiends | Hacker News Reader

I also did give a try after I saw a post here on HN about a new release. I wasn't very happy with it. There were many bugs that's a complete mess to get started with.

I tried the example on their documentation and got it running on my Linux box (which was very easy), but kept failing on Android due some missing dependency. These issues are not listed on their website, giving the impression it will just work out of the box. There by wasting a lot of time for anyone wanting to give it a try. After much googling I got to find out that SDL is not supported on Android for Kivy. You have to use PyGame and PIL. PIL isn't maintained anymore, so you can't just do:

    pip2 install PIL

Instead I had to run:

    pip2 install --no-index -f http://dist.plone.org/thirdparty/ -U PIL

Pillow didn't work for me, complained that it was compiled for some other platform. With that I was able to get rid of 'No text provider found' dependency error, but still I can't open the application because of some 'Window provider not found' error. I left it at that.

It's a cool project and I'd like to see it succeed, but there is a long way to go. I'd appreciate if someone could post a link on how to setup an environment that setups Kivy to build for Android.

You shouldn't in principle need to worry about the difference between the sdl2 and pygame/sdl backends on Android, since kivy's own API is the same in either case.

You don't need to install pil either (kivy preferentially uses other providers), unless directly using it in your own code, in which case you can include it in the android build by adding it to the python-for-android modules string or buildozer requirements line (just 'pil', this is the name of an internal recipe). If you have a window and text provider problem on android, that indicates that something is wrong with the android build, and we can help to debug if you provide the logs. I'm not sure offhand what problem would allow the android build to complete but give this error, but it would probably be revealed in the log.

This is more or less the same issue

https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/3234

I have since removed everything I setup, but I'll try to setup as I did before and give a complete log.

Ah, thanks. I suspect this is a bug related to the transition to sdl2, though I'm not sure what makes it present (it doesn't happen to everyone's android build).

If you're interested, one thing to try is (if you're using buildozer) to put 'kivy==master' in the requirements line instead of just 'kivy'. This will download the master branch, which may have a fix for this.

It not that, it's probably an issue somewhere in the python-for-android/buildozer build process, so that log would be the most interesting. If you're able to provide it that would be great, but thanks either way for reporting it.

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