Python apps might soon be running on Android OS

Python has gained great popularity among developers performing on machine learning and AI technologies. But thus far there's no place for Python on mobile apps. A brand new open-source project will allow Python apps to natively run on Android.

Guido Van Rossum, creator of Python, and a few other Python developers and mobile app design companies believe that the apps written within the language will natively run on Android and iOS soon. The open-source project called BeeWare allows porting apps to Android. The project is headed by Russel Keith-Magee. It allows converting CPython code to Android compatible package.

The project maintainer announced the primary Android milestone in February after getting a ‘pure’ Python app to run on the Android device. Later he announced an update at the 2020 Python Language Summit. BeeWare is designed to let developers write apps in Python and run that very same user interface (UI) everywhere using the same codebase running on iOS, Windows, Android.

CPython is an implementation of the open-source Python programing language. It's utilized by other implementations like Jython, writes in Java that relies on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Python Software Foundation awarded $50,000 grant to BeeWare project last year to bring its level of Android to support at part with its tools for iOS.

Python contributor and an engineer at MongoDB said, “BeeWare’s Android strategy was to compile Python to Java bytecode, but Android devices are now fast enough, and also the Android kernel permissive enough, to run CPython itself. To regular Python programmers, the mobile environment is an alien planet. There are not any subprocesses; sockets, pipes and signals all behave differently than on regular Unix; and lots of syscalls are prohibited.”

The programing language has no corporate funding on mobile because it doesn’t support mobile. Nobody is counting on mobile Python to be motivated to fund it. Developing mobile support would require extra money and other people than other Python initiatives, which is that the largest roadblock.