Python on Android Mobile?

[geremy condra]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know Python is growing in popularity and some of Palms devices
> already let you run Python apps in a VM environment.  I'm wondering if
> anyone knows (or can make an educated guess) if there are any plans
> for Python to come to the Android environment?  I'm not talking
> backend stuff here but full front and center like full GTK or WX
> development for the devices?
>
> Any thoughts?

There's the Android Scripting Environment, but it's not great, and its
a long way even from full Android development, let alone letting you
use things like GTK, which I doubt will ever happen. Last time I
looked you also couldn't build APKs with it, which basically rules it
out for use by people other than you.

There have also been a few ports of python to Android, including my
own basically wasted effort to bring Python3 to the platform and build
a complete wrapper for the necessary bits of Android. If you're bound
and determined to go with full Python on Android, this is the way to
go.

Having said that, Android has no dependency management, and so
you will have to distribute Python with your application and any other
application that wants to use it will be in the same boat. Since space
is limited on mobile devices, this isn't really an option.

Other approaches have been tried, but none that I know have been
successful- it turned out to be prohibitively difficult to teach Jython
to emit Dalvik bytecode, etc, etc.

Something I haven't seen is whether Cython could be used indirectly;
I don't have the knowledge or skill with it to do more than speculate,
but that might be a profitable avenue for investigation.

Wish I had better news for you,

Geremy Condra