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Kivy – a cross platform Python UI framework

205 points by peanball 2y ago

mark_l_watson 2y ago
I wrote one iOS app using Swift and SwiftUI. Has anyone written a Kivy iOS app and pushed it to the app store, if so, please share experiences.
- eonpi 2y ago
  Wrote a fairly complete POC in 2012 with kivy, it was able to render rather detailed floor plans, which was the most important feature of the POC since the idea was that, given the complexity, it should be written once and be able to run on multiple platforms with minimal changes, keeping in mind that mobile platforms were the priority. Most impressively, it was running very well on a first generation iPad, not to mention Android tablets, and of course, Mac, Windows, and Linux workstations. It was ultimately dismissed by the stakeholders because there was no way to render a web page inside the App, which was something kivy couldn't do back then.
  - mark_l_watson 2y ago
    Thanks, I will try it out then.
- brvier 2y ago
  I wrote a app to communicate with a medical device in 2018. Was published on Apple AppStore and Android PlayStore https://rvier.fr/images/chronomonitoring.png https://rvier.fr/images/chronomonitoring.png
  - mark_l_watson 2y ago
    Thank you.
bbor 2y ago
A) this is most European website I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t tell you exactly why… perhaps it’s the train subconsciously affecting me. 2) this is first time I’ve ever seen mobile included as part of “Cross-Platform”, that’s pretty awesome. We’re living in the future, friends! Tho it also makes me shudder at the thought of the phrase “QT app development”… III) At this point, why not just use web? What is a “truly cross platform UI framework” other than HTML? I’m currently developing a site that uses TS in the frontend and Python in the back, and that seemed like a nice Unix-y division of labor. What am I missing?
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  I think a lot of people dislike html/web-based apps, and they are not as responsive in some cases as well. I have seen some mobile browser implementations that explicitly put large delays (hundreds of ms) into their touch handlers for example. You can see a similar delay in a side-by-side comparison video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CwVN9RRbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CwVN9RRbE
  - cglong 2y ago
    Kivy's marketing seems to be targeting LOB apps. If I was going to develop one of those, I'd optimize for something standardized and easy to maintain (HTML/JS) vs. the performance benefits of a native UX or cross-platform framework.
    - KaiserPro 2y ago
      Kivy is old, so its improved more recently, but animation in HTML/JS is not power efficient. Everything is GL accelerated, so the UI is snappy and fast.
  - bbor 2y ago
    Thanks for the reply! If touch handler delays are intentional then it seems like an advantage, not a weakness — who am I to disagree with UX experts employed by some of the top-paying tech companies or Mozilla? This is really a synecdoche of the overall situation, from my perspective: some really good devs want absolute control over every part of the stack, and to feel “close” to bare metal as they code, whereas the dummies like me appreciate that someone did a lot of the hard work for us. In other words: how would that demo hold up if you asked them to recreate some popular react libraries, such as tables, graphs, and 3D simulations? When dealing with hard tasks (and network latency!) it seems like any platform-level delays would be quickly dwarfed by context-specific delays. And in the latter case, I’d rather have NPM than https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html ! PS did anyone else know NPM is now owned by Microsoft? We seriously need a revolution, or at the very least a figurative corporate guillotine. They own most of gaming, most of NLP/AI, most of dev tools, most of business/office computing, most of the OS market in general, most of… everything, it seems like. I’m just thrilled in hindsight that the windows phone failed!
russianasset 2y ago
[flagged]
mig39 2y ago
Does this work with JupyterlHub? Would be neat to try with some students currently learning Python with JupyterHub.
cglong 2y ago
The landing page is weird; it talks more about the funding for the framework than the framework itself. There's only one image showing UI, and the way its styled (cropped, tilted) makes me think its a stock photo, not a screenshot. The stock photo of a train right underneath isn't helping this perception for me. If you got as lost as me, the Gallery is accessible via a link at the top: https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Note that those are not stock widgets. And that's one of the main show stopper for me with kivy: it comes with very few built-in UI controls, so you have to code a lot of things yourself. I much prefer Python to JS, but things like react native win because of the community libs you can install save you tons of time, and produce a better result.
  - dheera 2y ago
    I prefer Python as a language but JS is much easier to package dependencies and ship a finished product. Python is a big fat conda-docker-shitshow because it doesn't provide a way to do import tornado==5.1.2 import torch==2.1.0 etc. while coexisting in the same shell environment as something else that wants different versions.
    - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      This is especially true when you use a lot of tooling. I love jupyter, but installing it in a venv means pulling a lot of deps which will affect a lot what I can install. Fortunately the Python community is much more serious about making deps that work together than the JS community, and the fact it works at all given the cartesian products of all the python modules is kind of a miracle and a testament to that. Unfortunately, that's a problem that is unlikely to be solved in the next decade, so we all live with it. The reverse problem is true for JS, and I see many projects shipping very heavy frontend code because despite all the tree shaking, they embed 5 times the same module with different versions in their bundle. That's one of the reasons for the bloated page epidemic. I guess it's a trade-off for all scripting languages: choosing between bloat or compat problem. Rust and Go don't care as much, and on top of that they can import code from 10 years ago and it sill works. However, and while I do know how hard it is to ship python code to the end user (at least if you don't use a web app), I don't think the version problem is the reason. We have zipapp and they work fine. No the main reason iscompiled extensions are very useful and popular, which means packaging is solving more than packaging python, but a ton of compiled languages at one. Take scipy: they have c, pascal and assembly in there. This can and will be improved though. In fact, thanks to wheels and indygreg/python-build-standalone, I think we will see a solution to this in the coming years. I'm even betting on astral to providing it.
cardanome 2y ago
So how is the accessibility story? No mentions on the site at all. I only found this https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8596 https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8596 so seems like not yet implemented. Meaning Kivy is not yet a good choice for user-facing apps. It is so frustrating to see all the new UI frameworks and they fall apart if you just ask about accessibility features that should be absolute standard in 2024.
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I think first tried Kivy in 2013, I wouldn’t call it new.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  I've heard some good things about beeware, but haven't tested it myself, so not sure. Most people I know use either qt or WX python.
- bmitc 2y ago
  Is there a cross-platform accessibility library? I can tell you that developing a cross-platform GUI framework is a gigantic can of worms fraught with forced yakshaving, no documentarion, no support, and endless bugs across the stack even down into the OS and GPU driver stack. So in my opinion, everyone asking for accessibility features on every GUI framework announcement should get together and make a GLFW for accessibility libraries so that it can indeed be standard.
  - bartekpacia 2y ago
    Sounds like AccessKit [0] to me [0]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
    - bmitc 2y ago
      Thanks. I'll take a look. But it being in Rust makes me a bit hesitant. A lot of these projects in Rust seem to fizzle out as soon as people get bored with them once they become hard. Do you know of anything major that's using it?
winrid 2y ago
FWIW JavaFX is still great too BTW. I have a decent sized app that'll run fine with a 50mb heap, and you get native OS installers too. No web support though.
- victor106 2y ago
  Does it appear native? And I keep hearing that even though swing is really old, it has better performance and that it’s used by IntelliJ. Not sure though
  - brnt 2y ago
    Funniest thing about Swing is that if you theme it (because you need to), you can make it look just as out of place (but modern!) as any Electron GUI.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Yes (to a reasonable approximation), after calling: UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName()); (https://docs.oracle.com/javase%2Ftutorial%2Fuiswing%2F%2F/lookandfeel/plaf.html#programmatic https://docs.oracle.com/javase%2Ftutorial%2Fuiswing%2F%2F/lo...)
    - bitwize 2y ago
      On Mac, the only thing that looks and feels native is the actual native Objective-C or Swift framework. Everything else has subtle differences, and yes, your users will notice. You may as well just ship a janky Electron app like Teams. But if you want to impress your users with a native feel, it's the Apple toolkits or nothing.
      - winrid 2y ago
        In my case the users were just really happy we solved the problem, I don't think they would care if it ran on minecraft redstone.
goffi 2y ago
There is a galaxy of projects around Kivy, such as https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android to compile python project for Android (with Kivy or not) or https://plyer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://plyer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for cross plateform API (notifications, hardware, filechooser, etc). For UI there is https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD for Material design on top of Kivy. And the team is nice (I've met some of them at PyCon or FOSDEM). The framework is pleasant to use, and there is a descriptive language, kv, which is really great. Cross compiling may be painful though (I did it for Android) and the app loading time is a bit long, but it's working. Some things may be missing in comparison to big frameworks such as Qt, there is no WebView for instance, and accessibility is unfortunately not as good. It's overall a very good project and it's a pity that it's not more known and used.
- graemep 2y ago
  I used Kivy once a few years ago for a device that had strict constraints on what it could run with the requirement to run the same code on desktop too (to display the same data). It worked very well for that. It was not an elaborate app, so I cannot comment on how well it might work with something bigger, but it worked very well for what I needed.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  I believe Qt's offering of Qt for Python/PySide6 even uses python-for-android in their android-deploy utility[1]. [1] https://www.qt.io/blog/taking-qt-for-python-to-android https://www.qt.io/blog/taking-qt-for-python-to-android
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    It's pretty new though, and it's a bit rough around the edges still. The other issue is that almost every single package/library for pyside6 only supports QtWidgets, not QML. Meaning you wouldn't be able to use tons of libraries that make up the python qt ecosystem (for example, pyqtwidgets or vispy). Not a huge dealbreaker but it's something to keep in mind.
serial_dev 2y ago
One cross platform Python framework I found interesting is flet https://flet.dev/ https://flet.dev/ It's powered by Flutter behind the scenes and familiar enough so that you can translate most things from Flutter/Dart tutorials to Flet. I haven't used it and I'll most likely never will (Flutter developer trying to pivot to real native development), but it seems to have an active community, and in theory, it enables developers to write relatively nice looking apps with a very popular language.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Last time I looked at Flet, it gave the impression that you had to use the wrapped Flutter widgets, making it hard to use widgets and packages from pub.dev in a Flet application.
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    If something isn't supported you can open an issue, or add that support yourself. The latter is relatively easy to do nowadays.
  - serial_dev 2y ago
    That seems to be the case even today: https://flet.dev/roadmap https://flet.dev/roadmap. As I see, you can use pure python packages, but not Flutter packages or Python packages with some other languages in the mix.
- BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
  Why do people keep doing things like investing in a framework, written by one set of developers, built on another framework, written by another set of developers, and acting like that is not insane? Unless both stacks are written by huge software companies that have an extreme vested interest in keeping them running, there is a huge risk of abandonment. Maybe Google just decides maintaining flutter is a pain in the ass and React Native is just good enough. Maybe the flet devs don't turn enough profit. Maybe flutter changes too radically and makes it difficult for flet to catch up. Such situations have happened again and again and again, and they will continue to into the future. What are we gaining here that is worth such an enormous risk?
pyeri 2y ago
I feel like an old grandpa while using tkinter!
- analog31 2y ago
  I still use tkinter for apps that I make for my own use. Those are often for lab automation, where a primitive GUI lets me avoid needing 3 hands while running an experiment, and the support for live graphs is extremely useful. For stuff that I'm likely to share with others, I've been moving over to Flet, because it lets me build things like webapps and stand-alone Windows apps. Both of those things can eliminate the hassles of installing Python apps as experienced by non-programmers. I hate writing GUI code, and in both cases have written crude wrappers that let me throw together a functional dialog with tolerable defaults for everything. This approach works for "programmers who shouldn't trust themselves to write GUI's," similar to the old Visual Basic.
  - pyeri 2y ago
    I think it's possible to use tkinter to develop even modern apps which don't look primitive, there are many open source projects which have done that including the IDLE editor itself, a part of core python project. The only issue is that it sometimes becomes excruciatingly difficult or painful to even perform some very little non-trivial things (like customizing a data-grid with a different style or having multiple tabbed pages) which are quite a simple task in other toolkits as they're already available in the form of a widget or component. If ever I decide to leave tkinter, I think a viable alternative I will try is free-pascal[1]. It's a more comprehensive and well-thought toolkit for creating GUIs, more importantly it is also open source and cross-platform. It's the FOSS version of Delphi IDE. [1]: https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
    - 7thaccount 2y ago
      I think you mean freepascal + Lazarus IDE/RAD right? I think the Lazarus tool makes GUIs somewhat easy to build.
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
kerkeslager 2y ago
I've kept an eye on Kivy for quite a while and prototyped a bunch of projects over the years with it, and I'm not a big fan. It feels like it's at the wrong level of abstraction for... basically everything. The Pong game demo is an example of this: if you're writing a Pong clone (or most video games) where you're going to be operating on a canvas, you don't need all the widget infrastructure that Kivy offers--you're better-served by something like PyGame. On the other hand, if you want to build a UI using standard widgets, the widgets they provide out of the box aren't particularly fully-featured or even good--you end up doing a lot of hand-coding of functionality that could be included, and the defaults aren't particularly desirable, so you end up having to configure a lot of, for example, visual display settings. As another user pointed out, their default widgets don't support accessibility meaningfully, and there are many other features, such as dark mode/color scheme support, which modern users expect and which you'll have to code yourself. Realistically, a lot of clients aren't going to give you funding for accessibility features, so the defaults are what most projects will end up with, and if it's me developing it, I'm doing accessibility on my own time, so I'd want this to be configuring what's largely already there, as opposed to what Kivy has: implementing it from scratch. In 2024 I'd view failing to support accessibility reasonably out of the box, as almost a moral failing, and certainly this is enough to discount Kivy from being used for any product intended to go to production. There IS a fairly vibrant ecosystem of 3rd-party widgets (flowers; there's a "garden" metaphor in their branding for the ecosystem). But this comes with all the problems of a 3rd-party ecosystem: Kivy itself is probably large enough that it won't become abandonware in the forseeable future, but 3rd-party projects aren't, and there are large security and reliability risks to pulling in a bunch of small packages maintained by developers of various talent, intention, and funding. These are risks you generally have to accept for something unusual, but you shouldn't have to accept these risks for your bread-and-butter widgets like buttons and dropdowns. If you're embarking on a project that benefits from using pre-built widgets like this, the framework I'd recommend is Flet. My experience with it has been overwhelmingly positive, and I've entirely switched away from PyQt for any new projects. The one criticism I'd give is that it doesn't really support multi-window, but that's something I'd avoid for most projects because multi-window support can never really be cross-platform, since mobile platforms don't really support windows as such.
dzonga 2y ago
out of all cross platform tools - dart / flutter is probably the easiest one. performant comes with all the widgets you want. web, mobile etc. react paid my rent but never again.
- brnt 2y ago
  Flet doesn't seem to have a Treeview. I find that actually few cross platform GUI toolkits do. Qt, Swing, Wx, but the trendy ones?
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Maybe Flet doesn’t but there are free view packages for Flutter (which was what GP mentioned).
bionhoward 2y ago
Every time I see a claim some thing is “the thing” I wonder about how many other things do similar things
OJFord 2y ago
Docs > Getting started's only code is in a screenshot? (That doesn't render properly, legibly, at least for me right now, on mobile?)
dang 2y ago
Related: Python dev considering Electron vs. Kivy for desktop app UI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889274 - March 2024 (9 comments) Python app development for beginners – Kivy mobile app tutorial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935529 - April 2021 (9 comments) Kivy: Cross-Platform Python Framework for UI Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25484451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25484451 - Dec 2020 (55 comments) An update on Python-for-android: v2019.06.06 released and future plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20133966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20133966 - June 2019 (7 comments) Kivy 1.10.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14297890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14297890 - May 2017 (33 comments) Python for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964561 - March 2017 (61 comments) Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127158 - July 2016 (45 comments) Kivy 1.9.1 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827322 - Jan 2016 (22 comments) Python on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482618 - May 2015 (49 comments) Kivy 1.9 – A framework for creating novel and performant user interfaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9315404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9315404 - April 2015 (16 comments) Kivy – Open-source Python library for rapid development of applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181306 - Aug 2014 (47 comments) Python on Android? First impressions of Kivy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677863 - Oct 2012 (10 comments) Kivy - Open source cross-platform library for rapid development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601016 - Oct 2012 (23 comments) Kivy: python UI framework. GPU accelerated, multi-input (win,osx,lin,android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773488 - July 2011 (18 comments)
prophittcorey 2y ago
Kivy led to one of my first open source contributions in 2014. I submitted Kivy file support to Vim. It was done via patch diffs over email with Bram Moolenaar. It's still in Vim today[1]. RIP Bram. [1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/syntax/kivy.vim https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/syntax/kivy.v...
- frakkingcylons 2y ago
  Nice, that’s pretty sweet. Also RIP Bram, great human being.
kumarvvr 2y ago
All these types of frameworks, ones that have code to make their own UI are fine, but what I really want is to have a declarative UI, like HTML or XAML, bound with some user interaction event engine and access to the underlying OS. Hopefully, we can have that someday, without the likes of Electron or whatnot. I would like to write a react app, with all its progress in UI/UX and thousands of libraries, package them into a Python app and distribute it as a desktop application.
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
  Pywebview + Pyinstaller gives you just that. https://pywebview.flowrl.com https://pywebview.flowrl.com https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/ https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/
- jennasys 2y ago
  Kivy gives you a pretty good separation of logic and UI with its declarative yaml-like kv files. For me, it conceptually feels a lot like developing in React.
tzury 2y ago
It’s 2024. None of the screenshots under the gallery are compelling or even acceptable these days. https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html Electron thus far seems to be the king of “desktop” ui.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > Electron thus far seems to be the king of “desktop” ui. For people that want to use the webstack, yes. But that's not everyone. A fast, fairly simple GUI system thats GPU accelerated is pretty rare even rarer if you want python support.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  Please anything but electron dear god
openrisk 2y ago
For Kivy to stop being a niche UI framework with marginal adoption it must somehow tap into the central role of Python in the broader data science / machine learning universe. Building data-centric cross-platform apps while staying (mostly [1]) within a single language ecosystem should be less friction and overhead than juggling multiple universes via API's, different runtimes and what not. What kind of apps would benefit from this "single language" approach? For sure not the more open ended, exploratory data science type tasks. These are better delivered via notebook workflows, which, besides flexibility, enable better reproducibility and auditing. Also probably nothing that requires high performance interactive graphics. But while not solving all UI problems for all people, there should be still plenty of relevant use cases where simplicity and fast prototyping give Kivy an edge when the task is to make algorithms and related tools available to non-technical users. [1] ofcourse the actual number crunching might be done by yet another layer (typically C/C++) but that layer is essentially hidden from the data orchestation and UI integration that would be the Kivy app focus.
xyproto 2y ago
Katrain uses Kivy and is problematic to package and upgrade because of it, on rolling release distros. When installing it with pip, it partially works. From a packaging point of view Kivy is not great.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  All of Python is pretty terrible from a packaging perspective.
holistio 2y ago
Am I the only one who read Kyiv?
ChrisChou 2y ago
I have been following the progress of this project for the past two years, but unfortunately the community support does not seem to be ready to take this project anywhere. The most basic app store in-app purchase support is directly rejected. If an application framework cannot quickly help people get started, how can it get people's support?
fefferkorn 2y ago
i like nicegui, but its more a web ui framework thing than a fully fledged desktop ui.
cbmuser 2y ago
Could someone fix the Kivy build with GCC 14? > https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8557 https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8557 This issue has been unresolved for half a year now.

205 points by peanball 2y ago

I wrote one iOS app using Swift and SwiftUI. Has anyone written a Kivy iOS app and pushed it to the app store, if so, please share experiences.

eonpi 2y ago
Wrote a fairly complete POC in 2012 with kivy, it was able to render rather detailed floor plans, which was the most important feature of the POC since the idea was that, given the complexity, it should be written once and be able to run on multiple platforms with minimal changes, keeping in mind that mobile platforms were the priority. Most impressively, it was running very well on a first generation iPad, not to mention Android tablets, and of course, Mac, Windows, and Linux workstations. It was ultimately dismissed by the stakeholders because there was no way to render a web page inside the App, which was something kivy couldn't do back then.
- mark_l_watson 2y ago
  Thanks, I will try it out then.
brvier 2y ago
I wrote a app to communicate with a medical device in 2018. Was published on Apple AppStore and Android PlayStore https://rvier.fr/images/chronomonitoring.png https://rvier.fr/images/chronomonitoring.png
- mark_l_watson 2y ago
  Thank you.

bbor 2y ago

A) this is most European website I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t tell you exactly why… perhaps it’s the train subconsciously affecting me. 2) this is first time I’ve ever seen mobile included as part of “Cross-Platform”, that’s pretty awesome. We’re living in the future, friends! Tho it also makes me shudder at the thought of the phrase “QT app development”… III) At this point, why not just use web? What is a “truly cross platform UI framework” other than HTML? I’m currently developing a site that uses TS in the frontend and Python in the back, and that seemed like a nice Unix-y division of labor. What am I missing?

ranger_danger 2y ago
I think a lot of people dislike html/web-based apps, and they are not as responsive in some cases as well. I have seen some mobile browser implementations that explicitly put large delays (hundreds of ms) into their touch handlers for example. You can see a similar delay in a side-by-side comparison video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CwVN9RRbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CwVN9RRbE
- cglong 2y ago
  Kivy's marketing seems to be targeting LOB apps. If I was going to develop one of those, I'd optimize for something standardized and easy to maintain (HTML/JS) vs. the performance benefits of a native UX or cross-platform framework.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    Kivy is old, so its improved more recently, but animation in HTML/JS is not power efficient. Everything is GL accelerated, so the UI is snappy and fast.
- bbor 2y ago
  Thanks for the reply! If touch handler delays are intentional then it seems like an advantage, not a weakness — who am I to disagree with UX experts employed by some of the top-paying tech companies or Mozilla? This is really a synecdoche of the overall situation, from my perspective: some really good devs want absolute control over every part of the stack, and to feel “close” to bare metal as they code, whereas the dummies like me appreciate that someone did a lot of the hard work for us. In other words: how would that demo hold up if you asked them to recreate some popular react libraries, such as tables, graphs, and 3D simulations? When dealing with hard tasks (and network latency!) it seems like any platform-level delays would be quickly dwarfed by context-specific delays. And in the latter case, I’d rather have NPM than https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html ! PS did anyone else know NPM is now owned by Microsoft? We seriously need a revolution, or at the very least a figurative corporate guillotine. They own most of gaming, most of NLP/AI, most of dev tools, most of business/office computing, most of the OS market in general, most of… everything, it seems like. I’m just thrilled in hindsight that the windows phone failed!

russianasset 2y ago

[flagged]

mig39 2y ago

Does this work with JupyterlHub? Would be neat to try with some students currently learning Python with JupyterHub.

cglong 2y ago

The landing page is weird; it talks more about the funding for the framework than the framework itself. There's only one image showing UI, and the way its styled (cropped, tilted) makes me think its a stock photo, not a screenshot. The stock photo of a train right underneath isn't helping this perception for me. If you got as lost as me, the Gallery is accessible via a link at the top: https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Note that those are not stock widgets. And that's one of the main show stopper for me with kivy: it comes with very few built-in UI controls, so you have to code a lot of things yourself. I much prefer Python to JS, but things like react native win because of the community libs you can install save you tons of time, and produce a better result.
- dheera 2y ago
  I prefer Python as a language but JS is much easier to package dependencies and ship a finished product. Python is a big fat conda-docker-shitshow because it doesn't provide a way to do import tornado==5.1.2 import torch==2.1.0 etc. while coexisting in the same shell environment as something else that wants different versions.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    This is especially true when you use a lot of tooling. I love jupyter, but installing it in a venv means pulling a lot of deps which will affect a lot what I can install. Fortunately the Python community is much more serious about making deps that work together than the JS community, and the fact it works at all given the cartesian products of all the python modules is kind of a miracle and a testament to that. Unfortunately, that's a problem that is unlikely to be solved in the next decade, so we all live with it. The reverse problem is true for JS, and I see many projects shipping very heavy frontend code because despite all the tree shaking, they embed 5 times the same module with different versions in their bundle. That's one of the reasons for the bloated page epidemic. I guess it's a trade-off for all scripting languages: choosing between bloat or compat problem. Rust and Go don't care as much, and on top of that they can import code from 10 years ago and it sill works. However, and while I do know how hard it is to ship python code to the end user (at least if you don't use a web app), I don't think the version problem is the reason. We have zipapp and they work fine. No the main reason iscompiled extensions are very useful and popular, which means packaging is solving more than packaging python, but a ton of compiled languages at one. Take scipy: they have c, pascal and assembly in there. This can and will be improved though. In fact, thanks to wheels and indygreg/python-build-standalone, I think we will see a solution to this in the coming years. I'm even betting on astral to providing it.

cardanome 2y ago

So how is the accessibility story? No mentions on the site at all. I only found this https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8596 https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8596 so seems like not yet implemented. Meaning Kivy is not yet a good choice for user-facing apps. It is so frustrating to see all the new UI frameworks and they fall apart if you just ask about accessibility features that should be absolute standard in 2024.

dec0dedab0de 2y ago
I think first tried Kivy in 2013, I wouldn’t call it new.
gostsamo 2y ago
I've heard some good things about beeware, but haven't tested it myself, so not sure. Most people I know use either qt or WX python.
bmitc 2y ago
Is there a cross-platform accessibility library? I can tell you that developing a cross-platform GUI framework is a gigantic can of worms fraught with forced yakshaving, no documentarion, no support, and endless bugs across the stack even down into the OS and GPU driver stack. So in my opinion, everyone asking for accessibility features on every GUI framework announcement should get together and make a GLFW for accessibility libraries so that it can indeed be standard.
- bartekpacia 2y ago
  Sounds like AccessKit [0] to me [0]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
  - bmitc 2y ago
    Thanks. I'll take a look. But it being in Rust makes me a bit hesitant. A lot of these projects in Rust seem to fizzle out as soon as people get bored with them once they become hard. Do you know of anything major that's using it?

winrid 2y ago

FWIW JavaFX is still great too BTW. I have a decent sized app that'll run fine with a 50mb heap, and you get native OS installers too. No web support though.

victor106 2y ago
Does it appear native? And I keep hearing that even though swing is really old, it has better performance and that it’s used by IntelliJ. Not sure though
- brnt 2y ago
  Funniest thing about Swing is that if you theme it (because you need to), you can make it look just as out of place (but modern!) as any Electron GUI.
- layer8 2y ago
  Yes (to a reasonable approximation), after calling: UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName()); (https://docs.oracle.com/javase%2Ftutorial%2Fuiswing%2F%2F/lookandfeel/plaf.html#programmatic https://docs.oracle.com/javase%2Ftutorial%2Fuiswing%2F%2F/lo...)
  - bitwize 2y ago
    On Mac, the only thing that looks and feels native is the actual native Objective-C or Swift framework. Everything else has subtle differences, and yes, your users will notice. You may as well just ship a janky Electron app like Teams. But if you want to impress your users with a native feel, it's the Apple toolkits or nothing.
    - winrid 2y ago
      In my case the users were just really happy we solved the problem, I don't think they would care if it ran on minecraft redstone.

goffi 2y ago

There is a galaxy of projects around Kivy, such as https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android https://github.com/kivy/python-for-android to compile python project for Android (with Kivy or not) or https://plyer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://plyer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for cross plateform API (notifications, hardware, filechooser, etc). For UI there is https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD for Material design on top of Kivy. And the team is nice (I've met some of them at PyCon or FOSDEM). The framework is pleasant to use, and there is a descriptive language, kv, which is really great. Cross compiling may be painful though (I did it for Android) and the app loading time is a bit long, but it's working. Some things may be missing in comparison to big frameworks such as Qt, there is no WebView for instance, and accessibility is unfortunately not as good. It's overall a very good project and it's a pity that it's not more known and used.

graemep 2y ago
I used Kivy once a few years ago for a device that had strict constraints on what it could run with the requirement to run the same code on desktop too (to display the same data). It worked very well for that. It was not an elaborate app, so I cannot comment on how well it might work with something bigger, but it worked very well for what I needed.
heavyset_go 2y ago
I believe Qt's offering of Qt for Python/PySide6 even uses python-for-android in their android-deploy utility[1]. [1] https://www.qt.io/blog/taking-qt-for-python-to-android https://www.qt.io/blog/taking-qt-for-python-to-android
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  It's pretty new though, and it's a bit rough around the edges still. The other issue is that almost every single package/library for pyside6 only supports QtWidgets, not QML. Meaning you wouldn't be able to use tons of libraries that make up the python qt ecosystem (for example, pyqtwidgets or vispy). Not a huge dealbreaker but it's something to keep in mind.

serial_dev 2y ago

One cross platform Python framework I found interesting is flet https://flet.dev/ https://flet.dev/ It's powered by Flutter behind the scenes and familiar enough so that you can translate most things from Flutter/Dart tutorials to Flet. I haven't used it and I'll most likely never will (Flutter developer trying to pivot to real native development), but it seems to have an active community, and in theory, it enables developers to write relatively nice looking apps with a very popular language.

heavyset_go 2y ago
Last time I looked at Flet, it gave the impression that you had to use the wrapped Flutter widgets, making it hard to use widgets and packages from pub.dev in a Flet application.
- skeledrew 2y ago
  If something isn't supported you can open an issue, or add that support yourself. The latter is relatively easy to do nowadays.
- serial_dev 2y ago
  That seems to be the case even today: https://flet.dev/roadmap https://flet.dev/roadmap. As I see, you can use pure python packages, but not Flutter packages or Python packages with some other languages in the mix.
BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
Why do people keep doing things like investing in a framework, written by one set of developers, built on another framework, written by another set of developers, and acting like that is not insane? Unless both stacks are written by huge software companies that have an extreme vested interest in keeping them running, there is a huge risk of abandonment. Maybe Google just decides maintaining flutter is a pain in the ass and React Native is just good enough. Maybe the flet devs don't turn enough profit. Maybe flutter changes too radically and makes it difficult for flet to catch up. Such situations have happened again and again and again, and they will continue to into the future. What are we gaining here that is worth such an enormous risk?

pyeri 2y ago

I feel like an old grandpa while using tkinter!

analog31 2y ago
I still use tkinter for apps that I make for my own use. Those are often for lab automation, where a primitive GUI lets me avoid needing 3 hands while running an experiment, and the support for live graphs is extremely useful. For stuff that I'm likely to share with others, I've been moving over to Flet, because it lets me build things like webapps and stand-alone Windows apps. Both of those things can eliminate the hassles of installing Python apps as experienced by non-programmers. I hate writing GUI code, and in both cases have written crude wrappers that let me throw together a functional dialog with tolerable defaults for everything. This approach works for "programmers who shouldn't trust themselves to write GUI's," similar to the old Visual Basic.
- pyeri 2y ago
  I think it's possible to use tkinter to develop even modern apps which don't look primitive, there are many open source projects which have done that including the IDLE editor itself, a part of core python project. The only issue is that it sometimes becomes excruciatingly difficult or painful to even perform some very little non-trivial things (like customizing a data-grid with a different style or having multiple tabbed pages) which are quite a simple task in other toolkits as they're already available in the form of a widget or component. If ever I decide to leave tkinter, I think a viable alternative I will try is free-pascal[1]. It's a more comprehensive and well-thought toolkit for creating GUIs, more importantly it is also open source and cross-platform. It's the FOSS version of Delphi IDE. [1]: https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    I think you mean freepascal + Lazarus IDE/RAD right? I think the Lazarus tool makes GUIs somewhat easy to build.
JodieBenitez 2y ago

kerkeslager 2y ago

I've kept an eye on Kivy for quite a while and prototyped a bunch of projects over the years with it, and I'm not a big fan. It feels like it's at the wrong level of abstraction for... basically everything. The Pong game demo is an example of this: if you're writing a Pong clone (or most video games) where you're going to be operating on a canvas, you don't need all the widget infrastructure that Kivy offers--you're better-served by something like PyGame. On the other hand, if you want to build a UI using standard widgets, the widgets they provide out of the box aren't particularly fully-featured or even good--you end up doing a lot of hand-coding of functionality that could be included, and the defaults aren't particularly desirable, so you end up having to configure a lot of, for example, visual display settings. As another user pointed out, their default widgets don't support accessibility meaningfully, and there are many other features, such as dark mode/color scheme support, which modern users expect and which you'll have to code yourself. Realistically, a lot of clients aren't going to give you funding for accessibility features, so the defaults are what most projects will end up with, and if it's me developing it, I'm doing accessibility on my own time, so I'd want this to be configuring what's largely already there, as opposed to what Kivy has: implementing it from scratch. In 2024 I'd view failing to support accessibility reasonably out of the box, as almost a moral failing, and certainly this is enough to discount Kivy from being used for any product intended to go to production. There IS a fairly vibrant ecosystem of 3rd-party widgets (flowers; there's a "garden" metaphor in their branding for the ecosystem). But this comes with all the problems of a 3rd-party ecosystem: Kivy itself is probably large enough that it won't become abandonware in the forseeable future, but 3rd-party projects aren't, and there are large security and reliability risks to pulling in a bunch of small packages maintained by developers of various talent, intention, and funding. These are risks you generally have to accept for something unusual, but you shouldn't have to accept these risks for your bread-and-butter widgets like buttons and dropdowns. If you're embarking on a project that benefits from using pre-built widgets like this, the framework I'd recommend is Flet. My experience with it has been overwhelmingly positive, and I've entirely switched away from PyQt for any new projects. The one criticism I'd give is that it doesn't really support multi-window, but that's something I'd avoid for most projects because multi-window support can never really be cross-platform, since mobile platforms don't really support windows as such.

dzonga 2y ago

out of all cross platform tools - dart / flutter is probably the easiest one. performant comes with all the widgets you want. web, mobile etc. react paid my rent but never again.

brnt 2y ago
Flet doesn't seem to have a Treeview. I find that actually few cross platform GUI toolkits do. Qt, Swing, Wx, but the trendy ones?
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Maybe Flet doesn’t but there are free view packages for Flutter (which was what GP mentioned).

bionhoward 2y ago

Every time I see a claim some thing is “the thing” I wonder about how many other things do similar things

OJFord 2y ago

Docs > Getting started's only code is in a screenshot? (That doesn't render properly, legibly, at least for me right now, on mobile?)

dang 2y ago

Related: Python dev considering Electron vs. Kivy for desktop app UI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889274 - March 2024 (9 comments) Python app development for beginners – Kivy mobile app tutorial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26935529 - April 2021 (9 comments) Kivy: Cross-Platform Python Framework for UI Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25484451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25484451 - Dec 2020 (55 comments) An update on Python-for-android: v2019.06.06 released and future plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20133966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20133966 - June 2019 (7 comments) Kivy 1.10.0 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14297890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14297890 - May 2017 (33 comments) Python for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964561 - March 2017 (61 comments) Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127158 - July 2016 (45 comments) Kivy 1.9.1 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827322 - Jan 2016 (22 comments) Python on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482618 - May 2015 (49 comments) Kivy 1.9 – A framework for creating novel and performant user interfaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9315404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9315404 - April 2015 (16 comments) Kivy – Open-source Python library for rapid development of applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181306 - Aug 2014 (47 comments) Python on Android? First impressions of Kivy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677863 - Oct 2012 (10 comments) Kivy - Open source cross-platform library for rapid development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601016 - Oct 2012 (23 comments) Kivy: python UI framework. GPU accelerated, multi-input (win,osx,lin,android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773488 - July 2011 (18 comments)

prophittcorey 2y ago

Kivy led to one of my first open source contributions in 2014. I submitted Kivy file support to Vim. It was done via patch diffs over email with Bram Moolenaar. It's still in Vim today[1]. RIP Bram. [1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/syntax/kivy.vim https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/syntax/kivy.v...

frakkingcylons 2y ago
Nice, that’s pretty sweet. Also RIP Bram, great human being.

kumarvvr 2y ago

All these types of frameworks, ones that have code to make their own UI are fine, but what I really want is to have a declarative UI, like HTML or XAML, bound with some user interaction event engine and access to the underlying OS. Hopefully, we can have that someday, without the likes of Electron or whatnot. I would like to write a react app, with all its progress in UI/UX and thousands of libraries, package them into a Python app and distribute it as a desktop application.

JodieBenitez 2y ago
Pywebview + Pyinstaller gives you just that. https://pywebview.flowrl.com https://pywebview.flowrl.com https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/ https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/
jennasys 2y ago
Kivy gives you a pretty good separation of logic and UI with its declarative yaml-like kv files. For me, it conceptually feels a lot like developing in React.

tzury 2y ago

It’s 2024. None of the screenshots under the gallery are compelling or even acceptable these days. https://kivy.org/gallery.html https://kivy.org/gallery.html Electron thus far seems to be the king of “desktop” ui.

KaiserPro 2y ago
> Electron thus far seems to be the king of “desktop” ui. For people that want to use the webstack, yes. But that's not everyone. A fast, fairly simple GUI system thats GPU accelerated is pretty rare even rarer if you want python support.
mikrotikker 2y ago
Please anything but electron dear god

openrisk 2y ago

For Kivy to stop being a niche UI framework with marginal adoption it must somehow tap into the central role of Python in the broader data science / machine learning universe. Building data-centric cross-platform apps while staying (mostly [1]) within a single language ecosystem should be less friction and overhead than juggling multiple universes via API's, different runtimes and what not. What kind of apps would benefit from this "single language" approach? For sure not the more open ended, exploratory data science type tasks. These are better delivered via notebook workflows, which, besides flexibility, enable better reproducibility and auditing. Also probably nothing that requires high performance interactive graphics. But while not solving all UI problems for all people, there should be still plenty of relevant use cases where simplicity and fast prototyping give Kivy an edge when the task is to make algorithms and related tools available to non-technical users. [1] ofcourse the actual number crunching might be done by yet another layer (typically C/C++) but that layer is essentially hidden from the data orchestation and UI integration that would be the Kivy app focus.

xyproto 2y ago

Katrain uses Kivy and is problematic to package and upgrade because of it, on rolling release distros. When installing it with pip, it partially works. From a packaging point of view Kivy is not great.

7thaccount 2y ago
All of Python is pretty terrible from a packaging perspective.

holistio 2y ago

Am I the only one who read Kyiv?

ChrisChou 2y ago

I have been following the progress of this project for the past two years, but unfortunately the community support does not seem to be ready to take this project anywhere. The most basic app store in-app purchase support is directly rejected. If an application framework cannot quickly help people get started, how can it get people's support?

fefferkorn 2y ago

i like nicegui, but its more a web ui framework thing than a fully fledged desktop ui.

cbmuser 2y ago

Could someone fix the Kivy build with GCC 14? > https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8557 https://github.com/kivy/kivy/issues/8557 This issue has been unresolved for half a year now.