It’s been a while since Kivy’s python-for-android project was revamped, so here’s a quick status update.
There have since been well over 200 commits from 15 different contributors, cleaning up the missing pieces of the new toolchain and adding new features that weren’t previously possible. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.
These fixes include progress on the remaining major goals of the python-for-android revamp. In particular, compilation is now supported for multiple target architectures - in principle anything targeted by the Android SDK (i.e. ARM, ARMv7a, x86, x86_64 and MIPS options), though I’ve tested only with the ARM and x86 ones. This means that Kivy applications, or other Python projects built with these tools, can be built for devices with e.g. intel atom processors. Even without this compilation it was often possible to run Kivy apps as many devices include libhoudini, but directly targeting them means such apps should now always work. A further advantage is that Kivy apps can be built for and tested on the Android emulator, which was not previously possible.
The architecture target support does need some more work to create fully multiarch APKs (i.e. including .so files for each target, so a single APK can work on different types of device). The problem here is that we need to duplicate as little as possible, as Kivy APKs are already made large by including the python interpreter, and it is undesirable to include two or more copies of everything. Using a single python installation and loading the .so dependencies as appropriate should be possible but needs more work. However, this is not a problem if uploading an APK to a store like Google Play; in this case you can include multiple APKs, one for each arch target, and the user will receive one that is appropriate.
Another important feature that I’ve worked on, but unfortunately unsuccessfully so far, is support for python3 APKs. The problem to be solved is to patch the interpreter to compile for Android (it cannot do so by default, due to problems with the Android platform like poor locale support), to modify the python-for-android bootstrap to load it correctly (it builds things a little differently to python2), and to modify the initialisation code to have it start successfully. I’ve only partially succeeded with the first two of these; using patches from the SL4A python-for-android tools (plus extras for our own modifications to python loading) allows the interpreter to be built, but it fails during Py_Initialize when run on the device, apparently raising an exception when calculating the python install path. Work on this will continue, but it’s hard to know how long it might take to resolve this error. If you know of any other projects patching python3.4+ for Android, I’d love to heard about it to compare their methods.