Introduction

It is 2014 and the Mobile is the new frontier, we are probably past the transition point of going from mainstream web to mainstream mobile in terms of usage and its a hopelessly messy affair for developers. If web development appeared untamed and wild and ugly back in the 90’s then mobile development is now a whole new level of ugliness.

Like the albatross that was Internet Explorer, Android today are the developer’s new albatross. Google has used its muscle to push its way to the top spot and now can claim to be King of the Hill. If you want to develop for the mobile market, it would be commercial suicide to ignore the Android market.

Android development to put it mildly is a pain in the rear side. Programmers do not usually develop for Android because they want too, like Internet Explorer it is because they HAVE too.

There are numerous blog’s already on the internet written by many a burned developers that have had to endure the punishment that is Android development. I don’t need to add to that hall of anguish.

Everything from installation, environment setup, stupid and over engineered SDK, device fragmentation, lack of consistent and current documentation has already been covered by many before me. I don’t want to cover those points in this blog post, instead I want to talk about a different way. What if I told you that Android development didn’t have to suck? what if I told you there was another way?

Another way, the Python way

What if you could just issue a few simple commands and have an entire environment set up for you?

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kivy-team/kivy
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install python-kivy

What if instead of installing a mammoth IDE and configuring it you could just open a text editor and simply program it (in a beautiful language)?

import kivy
from kivy.uix.widget import Widget
from kivy.app import App


class HomeScreen(Widget):


	def button_clicked(self):
		self.ids.home.counter += 1
		self.ids.label1.text = "you clicked " + str(self.ids.home.counter) + " times!"


class MyApp(App):

	
	def build(self):
		return HomeScreen()


if __name__ == '__main__':
	MyApp().run()

What if when you wanted to build a GUI you could just use a beautiful DSL that makes sense and is clean?

<HomeScreen>:
	BoxLayout:
		orientation: 'vertical'
		size: root.width, root.height
		id: home
		counter: 0
		
		Label:
			id: label1
			text: 'Hello World!'

		Button:
			id: button1
			text: 'click me!'
			on_press: root.button_clicked()

What if when you wanted to run the application you just ran it without needing some emulator?

python main.py

What if when you wanted to deploy it you just connected your mobile and issued a few simple commands?

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install buildozer
buildozer init
buildozer -v android debug deploy

What if for kicks you wanted to deploy to iOS?

buildozer -v ios deploy run

Well you don’t have to imagine, with Kivy and Python you can do this today. Doing things like accessing GPS is also just as effortless thanks to an high level API that does what all good API’s should do which is abstract away the pain.

Conclusion

Kivy is an amazing project for cross platform multi-touch GUI programming, Kivy is what I wanted mobile development to be like, simple straight forward and painless development and deployment. Although you can build some great apps this way and it may even be enough for cross platform development, it is still a hack.

So why did Google get mobile development so wrong? this comes to mind:

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.(Albert Einstein)

One day mobile development tools may be like Kivy but native and without all the hacks, and when that happens it will be the new King of Hill and not because of muscle, it will be because developers will flock to it.