[40four]

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?

[Tommstein]

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.

[eternityforest]

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.

[gcanyon]

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

[gcanyon]

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.