How good is kivy to access native hardware on Android and iPhone?

[rua...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I been studying kivy mostly for desktop, but now I'm in the middle of planning for making a mobile app for my business.

The app should be able to access basic hardware on smarthphone, will require things like:

- Local storage, local database

- Camera

- Accelerometers

- GPS

- Authentication, either password, finger print or face recognition.

Question is , how hard or easy it is for this resources to be accessed, or do I need extra custom code or maybe third party libraries to do so?

Thanks in advance

[Robert]

Lots of people build apps this way, noobs crash and burn until they learn. Easy is about knowing your own limitations,  starting slightly lower, and building on your experience step by step. Hard is building everything, pressing the button and being surprised that your perfect creation doesn't work as you expect.

Accessing native apis  is always (?) possible with Pyjnius or Pyobjus.

Plyer is very appealing and claims to address some of these issues directly. In most cases Plyer is a great abstraction, however I would recommend avoiding disappointment by first trying a test of any Plyer feature you might want to use. Keeping Plyer updated is a never ending task on mobile, it needs more love.

On Android I think you can Google for examples of all the things in the list (except perhaps face recognition, might be possible - I do know of a face detection example but this is not part of the Kivy package). See also https://github.com/Android-for-Python/Android-for-Python-Users and https://github.com/kivy/plyer/tree/master/examples

I just started trying out kivy-ios and (I'm going to make myself really unpopular with any Kivy developers reading this) I think its implementation is incomplete. I would characterize it as 'proof of concept'. 'GUI only' widgets work great. However some issues I quickly found: camera and image providers don't work, Python doesn't natively support iOS in its platform specific code so some work to do there, the kivy-ios toolchain design needs some design work. Documentation and examples are close to non-existent. Nothing that can't be addressed (I assume). Certainly not yet beta, perhaps the popular and disingenuous "pre-beta" applies? 

Anybody is looking for a project?  Kivy-ios would be a great one to work on.