Writing Android application using GPS data with Python

Question

I want to write an Android application using Python. I've found 2 options for that: kivy and SL4A. In kivy, at least for now, I can't use the GPS data. Anyone knows if I can get the GPS data using SL4A with Python? As I understood, one can write commercial apps using kivy. On the other hand, with SL4A you must install first SL4A and python on your Android device, so I'm not sure it's suitable for commercial apps. And last one, can I use funf with python?

Answer 1

You can package SL4A apps as APKs, and distrubute them through Play Store. It's loosely just like kivy in that respect.

As for quality, it really depends. Java apps are the best approach for efficient battery use and so on, plus GUIs in SL4A are always either very simple or non-native webviews, so complex GUIs look unique to the application, though using something like jQuery Mobile can help you put something half decent together pretty quickly.

Ultimately, there's no reason you can't do a commercially successful Android app in Python. It's just that a pro-Android dev generally wouldn't try to.

I used SL4A and kivy, but tend to use SL4A. Others tend to use kivy. You'll have to really think about each app's needs, or just use Java.

Update: You can now use FullScreenUI to render native user interfaces from SL4A, but it's experimental, and I haven't used it to be able to say how well it works.