Flet packaging for iOS and Android has been relying on Kivy and it was super annoying when your app depends on Python binary packages, such as Numpy or Pillow. You needed to compile those packages yourself using Kivy command line tools. It was really frustrating and even hopeless if Kivy didn't have "recipes" for some packages, like Pydantic.

Kivy no more! We've just published Flet 0.25.0.dev3519 pre-release with the improved flet build command which does not use Kivy! Flet is now using its own Python runtime "meticulously crafted in-house".

Flet packaging implementation for iOS and Androind adheres to strict specifications defined in PEP 730 (iOS) and PEP 738 (Android) which were implemented and released in Python 3.13 (and back-ported to Python 3.12). When pypi.org supports wheel tags for iOS and Android and 3rd-party Python package maintainers start uploading their mobile packages Flet will be compatible with them and you'll be able to use them in your Flet app.

I am very happy to announce the release of Flet version 0.24.0! It comes with a very long list of bug fixes, several enhancements and new features.

We are excited to announce the release of Flet 0.23.0. It is a big release with many new features and bug fixes.

Last week we attended PyCon US in a beautiful city of Pittsburgh, PA!

I've been on many conferences, but at PyCon I was amazed by the spacious venue, flawless event organization, high-quality content and welcoming community 😎, ...and good food 🍔!

We met a lot of great people and, especially, wonderful people from Beeware (hello Russell, Malcolm and Russell 👋). They did a great job of popularizing Python on mobile and advocating the addition of iOS and Android to the list of supported platforms in the next release of Python 3.13 🎉!

We enjoyed good talks and inspirational key notes, learned new things, enjoyed the city. Lightning talks (short 5-minute presentations) were real fun!

Oh, I saw Guido van Rossum (The Creator of Python himself, in case you didn't know 😅) at Microsoft booth, but didn't have a chance to take a picture with him as there was a line up 😉.

As first time attendees we did't do talks or presentations, but watched and learned instead. We plan to present next year 🤞.

Next PyCon US is going to be at the same place. Will come again and hope to see more of you there!

The problem​

When you package your Flet program in Python to run on a mobile device (or desktop) the resulting bundle (.apk, .ipa, .exe, .app) contains your Python program, Python interpreter and Python Standard Library.

If your program uses only Python standard library then packaging process is relatively easy - Flet zips your code and combines Flutter app together with Python interpreter and standard library both compiled for the target platform: Android or iOS.

However, problems may arise when your Flet program uses third-party packages, with thousands of them published on PyPI or Conda.