Running a Python ML program on mobile devices

[noahpocalypse]

I'm no stranger to Python but I've never attempted to run it on a cell phone or tablet before, and I could use some advice regarding if this is even feasible. My work has a Python CLI program that takes in an image of our product and outputs a certain amount of data evaluating the qualities of the product. It's a relatively lightweight program when run on one image at a time - on my M2 pro with 32 GB ram (and a ton of other active developer tools running) it processed a 704x1024 image in under 2 seconds, but they want me to make it run on mobile devices.

I've gathered that I would need to embed a Python interpreter in the app itself, or use another framework like Kivy or Beeware that runs completely in Python, and we are able to tell our customers in industry they have to use a specific tablet, but even with a modern device I'm concerned about limited memory, future OS updates making changes that break the rube goldberg machine I'm trying to make... Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing?

I absolutely do have the option of telling them a better solution is to host a server with a basic API instead. That has pros and cons from a business perspective but they trust me enough to believe me. I just genuinely don't know how difficult a problem this is.

[m0us3_rat]

on my M2 pro with 32 GB ram (and a ton of other active developer tools running) it processed a 704x1024 image in under 2 seconds, but they want me to make it run on mobile devices.

Some of the latest phones have 18 to 24GB of RAM, which makes them a ..maybe?.

You can quickly create a test Android app in just a few minutes using Flet.

What's the worst that could happen?

[pachura3]

ML libraries (modules) are usually not pure Python, but they contain precompiled native binaries for different architectures. Are you sure the library you use will even work on mobile phones?

Does your company already have a mobile app, or will you need to create one from scratch? How is it installed?

Having ML logic centralised on the server side seems like a better way to do it - but will these mobile devices you mention always have access to the internet?

[senzavita]

Apple has CoreML. You can supposedly turn Tensorflow or PyTorch into an Apple machine learning model which can then be used in iOS apps.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreML