A new project aims to make it easy to distribute Python applications for Android. The newly launched Python for Android project is a tool which takes a Python application and, after ensuring the Android SDK/NDK is installed, creates a Python distribution containing the runtime and the set of modules needed to run the application, packaged as an Android APK file.

It was created by the developers of the Kivy cross-platform open source rapid application development library to support their framework. To that end, the packaged applications currently only have one "bootstrap" which decompresses the files, creates an OpenGL ES 2.0 surface for drawing and sets up to handle audio and touch events. Although built for the Kivy project, the developers welcome anyone prepared to create a new lighter bootstrap mechanism. Python has been executable on Android through the Android Scripting project, but that doesn't create simple-to-install, self-contained binary files.

More details about the package are available, along with the source code, on the project's github repository. Currently the code has only been tested running on Ubuntu 11.10 and only supports including a small range of Python modules (peg, pil,png, sdl, sqlite3, pygame, kivy, android, libxml2, libxslt, lxml, ffmpeg, openssl). The Python for Android code is licensed under the LGPLv2.

(djwm)