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How to develop Android app completely using python? [closed]

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I would like to develop a (rather simple) android app to be distributed via Play Store. I would like to do so completely in python. However, the online research hasn't quite enlightened me: most comments are either outdated (>1 year old, and I feel there might be better integration of python since then) or they talk about running python in android (e.g. here).
Therefore, I'm looking for information regarding the questions:
is it feasible to develop an App completely in python - and what are the tools to do so? (Is e.g. Kivy recommendable?)
if so: what are the best software environments to implement this? (I unsuccessfully tried using Android Studio but couldn't figure out a way to run python code there.)
I'm quite new to app development and would highly appreciate any leads of doing this in python rather than in Jave etc., which I don't know yet.

To answer your first question: yes it is feasible to develop an android application in pure python, in order to achieve this I suggest you use BeeWare, which is just a suite of python tools, that work together very well and they enable you to develop platform native applications in python.
checkout this video by the creator of BeeWare that perfectly explains and demonstrates it's application
How it works
Android's preferred language of implementation is Java - so if you want to write an Android application in Python, you need to have a way to run your Python code on a Java Virtual Machine. This is what VOC does. VOC is a transpiler - it takes Python source code, compiles it to CPython Bytecode, and then transpiles that bytecode into Java-compatible bytecode. The end result is that your Python source code files are compiled directly to a Java .class file, which can be packaged into an Android application.
VOC also allows you to access native Java objects as if they were Python objects, implement Java interfaces with Python classes, and subclass Java classes with Python classes. Using this, you can write an Android application directly against the native Android APIs.
Once you've written your native Android application, you can use Briefcase to package your Python code as an Android application.
Briefcase is a tool for converting a Python project into a standalone native application. You can package projects for:
Mac
Windows
Linux
iPhone/iPad
Android
AppleTV
tvOS.
You can check This native Android Tic Tac Toe app written in Python, using the BeeWare suite. on GitHub
in addition to the BeeWare tools, you'll need to have a JDK and Android SDK installed to test run your application.
and to answer your second question: a good environment can be anything you are comfortable with be it a text editor and a command line, or an IDE, if you're looking for a good python IDE I would suggest you try Pycharm, it has a community edition which is free, and it has a similar environment as android studio, due to to the fact that were made by the same company.
I hope this has been helpful

You could try BeeWare - as described on their website:
Write your apps in Python and release them on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web, and tvOS using rich, native user interfaces. One codebase. Multiple apps.
Gives you want you want now to write Android Apps in Python, plus has the advantage that you won't need to learn yet another framework in future if you end up also wanting to do something on one of the other listed platforms.
Here's the Tutorial for Android Apps.

Android, Python !
When I saw these two keywords together in your question, Kivy is the one which came to my mind first.
Before coming to native Android development in Java using Android Studio, I had tried Kivy. It just awesome. Here are a few advantage I could find out.
Simple to use
With a python basics, you won't have trouble learning it.
Good community
It's well documented and has a great, active community.
Cross platform.
You can develop thing for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and even Raspberry Pi with this single framework.
Open source.
It is a free software
At least few of it's (Cross platform) competitors want you to pay a fee if you want a commercial license.
Accelerated graphics support
Kivy's graphics engine build over OpenGL ES 2 makes it suitable for softwares which require fast graphics rendering such as games.
Now coming into the next part of question, you can't use Android Studio IDE for Kivy. Here is a detailed guide for setting up the development environment.

There are two primary contenders for python apps on Android
Chaquopy
https://chaquo.com/chaquopy/
This integrates with the Android build system, it provides a Python API for all android features. To quote the site "The complete Android API and user interface toolkit are directly at your disposal."
Beeware (Toga widget toolkit)
https://pybee.org/
This provides a multi target transpiler, supports many targets such as Android and iOS. It uses a generic widget toolkit (toga) that maps to the host interface calls.
Which One?
Both are active projects and their github accounts shows a fair amount of recent activity.
Beeware Toga like all widget libraries is good for getting the basics out to multiple platforms. If you have basic designs, and a desire to expand to other platforms this should work out well for you.
On the other hand, Chaquopy is a much more precise in its mapping of the python API to Android. It also allows you to mix in Java, useful if you want to use existing code from other resources. If you have strict design targets, and predominantly want to target Android this is a much better resource.

Xamarin vs Titanium Appcelerator? [closed]

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I developed a Native Android App, now the requirement is that the developed app needs to be in a cross platform like Xamarin or Titanium Appcelerator, now please some Experts Software Engineers Suggest me that which cross platform should I choose and why? If I choose Xamarin then what are the advantages and disadvantages of Xamarin and if I choose Titanium Appcelerator then what are the advantages and disadvantages of titanium?? Any help will be highly appreciated.

Some factors where the 2 are different (or not).
Price
By now, both cost money. Xamarin has a useless (only very small apps) free version, paid versions start at 25$/mo. https://store.xamarin.com/
Titanium Studio used to be free, but they unfortunately changd it few weeks ago. Existing free users are moved to a free lifetime indie license (which is nice!), new ones have to pay, minimum of 39$/mo. http://www.appcelerator.com/pricing/
Also, the most recent version of Titanium is invitation-only and though I got an invitation to register for invitation, I am still waiting for weeks now to be accepted.
So Xamarin has a slight edge here - by now - though you also need to see what you want to do. Indie edition is ok to get everything "normal" done, though it lacks the Visual Studio integration.
Platforms supported
Xamarin supports Android and iOS, WinPhone is supported since .net runs on WP.
Titanium supports Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Web, WinPhone is said to be supported but does not work at all. https://developer.appcelerator.com/question/181588/how-to-update-to-preview-to-do-windows-development-the-requested-sdk-version-does-not-have-an-assigned-commands-handler
Titanium Studio with Windows Phone Plugin: Titanium SDK does not support the Windows platform This - should - work with the new version 4, which is rumored to be available, but I have not seen it (though I tried).
So, if you want WinPhone, use Xamarin, if you want BlackBerry, use Appcelerator.
IDE
Xamarin has Visual Studio integration (Business edition or higher), which is great. Visual Studio is just one of the best, perhaps the best, IDEs out there. Xamarin Studio is so so.
Titanium Studio is so so, similar to Xamarin Studio.
Installation and Ease of Use
Xamarin has an all-in-one installer that takes some time, but then you can start. It just works. Xamarin has very frequent updates (every few weeks), which it sometimes needs, since certain features are broken is certain versions.
Getting Titanium Studio to work is often a hassle. I had to (this is not documented!) use Java 1.6 32Bit, which can be difficult since normally one updates his Java. Officiall, Java 1.8 is supported, but this just did not work for me. Titanium Studio is way more difficult to set up. Titanium has infrequent udpates, less than once a month.
Language
Xamarin is C#. You get a great, typed language, that scales from small to very complex applications, and has great language constructs for complex data types and scenarios
Titanium is JS. You get a good dynamic language that is very flexible, and is mainly for small, flexible applications.
You can create good programs in both languages, it is a little more difficult in Javascript.
Both compile to native.
You can use both the many js (Titanium) and .net (Xamarin) libraries and frameworks out there.
Cross-Platform
Xamarin introduced Xamarin.Forms last year to provide cross-platform GUI. It is working, though a lot still is missing, like orientation needs to be implemented manually.
Using cross-platform hardware also is not easy. There are addons that you really should check out like xlabs https://github.com/XLabs/Xamarin-Forms-Labs though I have found not a single feature there to be working (of the ones I tried). Bug request were handled quickly though so I would assume this product to mature and eventually be very very helpful to allow having 1 code base for all platforms with very very little platform dependent code (just the DI part).
Titanium I have not really used much for this so I cannot really comment.
The Rest
Communities are large for both products.
Appcelerator has a free university program (videos to watch/download). Xamarin has an expensive university program, but that includes tutoring and small web classes. There also are free videos.
Appcelerator seems to need to make money by now. Xamarin always needed to make money, they have some backing by Microsoft by now, which is helpful of course.
Most important is probably your language background. it is not the most important, since you will still need to learn a lot about mobile and each platform as well.
Also, check out the competition: PhonGap/Cordova, and some new, smaller players, some C# and some C++ based.
Xamarin 2.0 vs Appcelerator Titanium vs PhoneGap
Comparison between Corona, Phonegap, Titanium
In your specific case: Java and C# are very very similar, much more than Java and Javascript.
You can get a free trial of the business version and also extend it a few times if you directly contact customer support and have good reasons - so I was told.

Months ago we had to choose between those 2 solutions. Our decision was made by the price of Xamarin which is really expensive when titanium is totally free. There is also more doc on Titanium and a bigger community due to his price.
The main disadvantage for me about titanium is that you absolutely need an internet connection to work with it. It's really annoying because you cannot open any project without wifi.

This decision is a matter of preference and requirements. With regards to developing a complex mobile app, I personally feel like the debugging and profiling tools that a strongly typed language framework gives you (such as Xamarin) are far better than those offered by developing a complex app in a weakly typed language framework (such as Titanium). Both offer you the full extent of the native mobile platform APIs (a characteristic that I personally consider essential), but Xamarin offers the following advantages:
the strongly typed and highly expressive C# and F# languages
great IDEs, like Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio
a vibrant and active community of developers
great profiling tools
Xamarin Insights for detailed post-deployment app performance monitoring
I'm a bit biased because I really enjoy doing Xamarin development. But I feel like 4 years in the mobile dev industry has given me a great deal of perspective on the options.
Again, as long as each framework provides full access to every bit of the mobile platform APIs, it really does boil down to preference. But my vote is very much for Xamarin.

How is cross platform mobile development done in practice today (year 2013)? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I am a .NET developer (more than 6 years now) and just starting to learn about mobile/smartphone/tablets development. Logically, I (and probably everybody else out there) would like the application we create to run on all smartphone platforms. It just feels natural from the normal user (layman) perspective that if it's a "mobile app" it should run on mobile device. It shouldn't matter if I own iPhone or Android, mobile app is a mobile app. Note: I am talking about native platform development, not HTML/web apps that can be used from browsers.
So this is just a high-level overview question... what are the current strategies (in year 2013) to deal with this issue? The way I imagine mobile cross platform development works is there's probably a single common code base that implements app's business logic and then for each targeting platform we need to develop GUI part separately. How far is this from truth in practice?
Take for example the popular game "Angry Birds". I played it on iPhone, Android and even from Chrome browser on Windows Desktop (probably as Flash or HTML5 game) and each version had pretty much identical feeling when played. How did they do that? I imagine they have game engine as common code but in what language could it be written? As far as I know there is no common programming language that given the single source code files it can be compiled into native binaries for ios/android/win8 phone.

Unfortunately, there is no way to develop a cross-platform app which has really native look and feel and shares same code for all platforms.
Its possible to share some code on some platforms though (for example, you can use C/C++ for iOS and Android), but only for the logic part of your app. To get native UI you will be forced to use native APIs. If your app doesn't involve some complicated data processing then this approach may have more downsides than really helping you out.
You can get rather good platform independence with hybrid app platforms such as PhoneGap or Titanium, but that involves HTML/Javascript development which could lead to a lot of time and efforts required to bring user experience to be somewhat similar to that of a native app.

Since you are a .NET Dev one logical solution for you would be to use Xamarin's offerings. (http://xamarin.com/) They allow you to develop your back-end logic once and then compile it into all three major mobile platforms (iPhone/Android/WP). You can then use this back-end logic project to write the UI layer for each specific platform.
Another option that devs have is to use the javascript/html route similar to PhoneGap. While I haven't looked at this recently there used to be some performance hits and hardware usability gaps when going the JS/HTML route. This may have been improved now.
EDIT:
Since you specifically mentioned games like Angry Birds. The Unity platform offers very good support for development that is compatible with most devices if you need 3D.
For Angry Birds specifically...they use Box2D for the Physics and I'm not 100%, but it looks like Cocos2d to draw the elements.
If you are looking to build games and like the idea of Xamarin then take a look at MonoGame which basically looks like an XNA port to the Mono Framework.

in addition of Jared's answer, this afternoon I tested Xamarin.
You are a .Net Developer and if you are already using Visual Studio, you are so lucky. Because Xamarin has an extension for Visual Studio
I just want to give a bad impression about xamarin, you can test good ones by the time, user interface is created in a xml based file and there is no auto complete, so you have to write whole code or use properties window. But I think it will be better by the time. nice coding

iPhone and Android programming for mobile games? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I want to write simple games for mobiles, something like a good Tetris program. I want it to work on Android and iPhone phones.
My current knowledge of programming is fairly good in web development such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and C/C++, and Java, all intermediate level, and basic OpenFL programming.
I have the following questions:
If I code in XCode can I port/deploy it on Android phones?
What are the languages/packages I need to learn?
Can I get some helpful tutorial links to the same for a new bee?

Most of the people I know that port between iphone and android using the native tools use C++ / OpenGL ES / OpenAL and small amounts of objective-c / android NDK to handle the OS specific stuff. You want to reduce the OS specific code as much as possible as that is the code you have to rewrite for new platforms.
This can be a lot to handle if you have never done it before.
If it's your first time doing game development you may like to go down another path like Unity3d or Corona SDK. Since you want to do 2d game development Corona may be a better fit.
Both Corona and Unity3d have great forums that will help you out.
If you want to learn Objective-C, then I would suggest the Cocos2D engine for 2d game development. Again they have a great forum for asking questions.

For iPhone you will have to know Objective-C
For Android you have more choices Java should be the first one on the list.
And the of cause you could use the android-scripting framework.
Android Scripting
A Pretty interesting Project is Titanium by appcelerator.
Titanium
You can use Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3 so it might work out pretty well for you.
They furthermore have a pretty big community.
Hope this helps!

Depends what you mean by port. In general it's not a straightforward task. Both Android and iOS have OS-specific APIs which you will use. Additionally, the languages are also different (see #2). The language and platform differences will likely cause you to write your application somewhat differently.
For Android: Java. For iOS: Objective-C. As far as gaming goes, OpenGL will serve you well. You could consider using a 2D graphics library that will abstract that a bit too like libGDX, AndEngine, or Cocos2D. If you do though, be aware that if that library isn't on both platforms, you'll have an even harder time porting. Again, for each platform you'll want to look at their platform docs too. Here for Android, and on Apple's developer site for iOS.
As far as Android goes, look at the source code for Replica Island. Can't say I can recommend you a great iPhone game dev tutorial unfortunately.

The native SDK for iOS uses Objective-C, and the native SDK for Android uses Java. Most people develop native apps in those languages directly. Even if they shared the same language, the two system's work so differently under the hood that you wouldn't be able to share the code directly. In both cases however you can use C++ to do most of the graphics programming in OpenGL, so that part at least you could share directly.
There are a number of cross-platform solutions available however, allowing you to deploy both iOS and Android apps from the same codebase. For a 2D puzzle game a pretty ideal solution is Corona SDK.

A major misconception by many game developers is that it's somehow better to develop your game specifically for either iOS or Android from the start. I've been developing mobile games for years and am finding that developing portable games that run perfectly on both Android and iOS takes no longer than writing specifically for one - so long as you use one of the modern platform libraries, like BatteryTech. Porting has been a non-issue for us since we switched.

I want to answer on the second question.
Look at this post to see the Infographics that visualize what language uses every OS. I think it will be quite helpful for you.

Converting iPhone/iPad apps onto Android [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I have started to build my own apps on iPhone and iPad using the iPhone SDK. The next question that is always asked by the client is, "Can we have it on Android?"
So my question to you, 'the internet', is: what are my options?
I don't have the time to learn another language (learning iOS has been enough!), so are there companies who specialize in this, or are there any online services that do a conversion?
Any help on this welcome, just need to know which way to turn...

No, there is no way to convert an existing iOS app to an Android app.
However, there are cross-platform frameworks that allow you to code once and deploy your app in more than one platform. The most popular are based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript and one of them is PhoneGap.
You can also develop for iOS and Android with Adobe technologies such as Adobe AIR (this was forbidden by Apple until recently).
And there are online services (such as Mobile Roadie) that allow you to generate cross-platform apps using a content management system.
That said, I strongly recommend to:
Learn Android and Java development if you want to specialize in mobile development.
Take advantage of the strengths of each platform when working on an iOS/Android project, instead of creating something that uses only what's common to both.

Converting a native application from one mobile platform to the other is not a straight-forward process unless the initial application was built with a framework with cross-platform capabilities from the start.
Your options at this point are learn the other platform and develop it yourself, or contract with another development company which specializes in the platform you need to target.

Due to the massive differences between the 2 platforms, you are looking at a complete rewrite of your application. You either do it yourself or pay someone else to do it. I don't see any shortcuts you can take.

You may be interested in reading my book, HTML5 for iOS and Android, which enables you to take web apps created in HTML, JavaScript & CSS, and turn them into standalone apps that you can upload to the app stores (for free or to sell). See http://html5formobile.com - the wrappers to do this for the iOS and Android SDKs are freely available on the website, and you don't need any knowledge of either programming language if you follow the instructions in the book.

You can try the following https://bitbucket.org/zabirauf/icona.
Its open source iOS to Android Application Conversion Tool.

Even if there was a way to easily port an Objective-C application to Java, I wouldn't highly encourage it. iPhone users and Android users are two different families of users. The typical iPhone interface just wouldn't sit well with Android users who aren't familiar with how the iPhone works. Yes, I understand that the UIs of both iPhone and Android seem pretty trivial to learn to most people, but when you break a novice's comfort zone, it puts your applications (or websites) on a higher learning curve.
You should take the time to learn Android's language and UI and develop your application in a fashion that is consistent with how applications on Android work. As said in other answers, if your taught yourself Objective-C, you should find that Java will come pretty easily to you. In addition, in never hurts to know more than one programming language.

You can't just convert iOS apps into Android. iOS is Objective-C and Android is Java.
I highly doubt there are 'converters' on the internet, even if there are that's not the way you should program an app because every SDK has his own special capabilities and you should use them for maximum user-experience.
I'm sure there are some companies who specialize in porting apps from iOS to Android. Look it up on Google I'd say..

If you want an easy place to look for android development you can try appMaker which I hear is a GUI based Android development tool or I believe Google has released its own GUI based android application development tool. If you are not a java programmer than you might be better off with the gui. Otherwise I would say android is not too different from traditional java. As a java programmer who went from Android to iOS, I will tell you Android is a walk in the park compared to learning iOS. Two completely different beasts in my opinion.

Selecting a mobile development environment which will enable you write once and deploy/distribute it on many devices would be a better solution in the future. If your application is HTML-based, go with HTML5/CSS alternative (ex: PhoneGap, ). If you prefer native, then chances are you may want to learn Lua, a scripting language (ex: Gideros Studio) or C++ (ex: Mosync).
Other than that, the application you created on iOS with Objective-C is very, very hard to port to Android and other devices.