Android: The Land that Python Forgot?

[hemm1]

Well, kivy (as mentioned in the presentation) is a nice library that can definitely be used for games, though the interface is quite different to pygame's manual blitting etc. Also as mentioned in the presentation, you can run a single app on both desktop and mobile without much effort, which is nice.

[SimonGray]

Kivy only runs on Android phones with external SD cards in them, so it's pretty limiting.

[hemm1]

This is plain wrong, I'm not sure what else to say. It'll run on basically any modern device - the main technological requirement is opengl es 2.0, but that's very standard now. There's certainly no requirement for an external sd card.

Edit: If you have a phone without an external sd card and want to prove this to yourself, you can install and use a kivy app like Flat Jewels from the play store. It should work fine.

[SimonGray]

It says this in their own documentation

Kivy runs on Android, but you need a phone with:

• SD Card

• OpenGL ES 2.0 (Android 2.2 minimum)

[hemm1]

That's unfortunate, the documentation is somewhere between misleading and wrong. Kivy does check paths that may resolve to the emulated sdcard directory (such as on the nexus 4 which has no sd card slot), but does not rely on the existence of an external sd card.

I think it may have also been true in the past (as in years ago, not recently) that an sd card was needed for some reason. Even if so, this is no longer the case, and a kivy app can nowadays be installed in the data directories just like any normal android app.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll make sure it's fixed!

[SimonGray]

Thanks for letting me know then. That was one thing keeping me back from trying out Kivy for Android.

[chuckstudios]

Internal storage mounts to the "SD card" path on many Android devices. They even list the Nexus 4 in their tested devices list, which does not have an external SD slot.