I have played with some frameworks for mobile development, mainly with Ionic. But Ionic is a big system with a lot of dependencies. You have to have at least a basic understanding of Node.js. You have to decide if you want to be Team Angular or Team React.^[1] And, I don’t know much JavaScript, but I know quite some Python.

So, to get a feeling for how difficult build and deployment of Kivy is in comparison to, say, Ionic or Flutter, I said to myself: Why not give Kivy a try? Shall we?

I tried. And I failed.

All this happened on Fedora.

First, you need Buildozer, so install it:

My Fedora installation was fresh, so Buildozer could not find javac. So I installed it. Note that installing the package java-latest-openjdk is not enough. Which is a bit strange, because JDK means Java Developer Kit and this should contain javac, in contrast the the JRE, the Java Runtime Environment, which, as we all know, does not. So, you have to install the package java-latest-openjdk-devel to really get javac.

Buildozer now installs and sets up a lot of stuff, but: Next problem: Autoreconf is missing, so the build fails. So do:

Maybe now we’re fine. We’re not. The build fails with

This is where I gave up. Maybe one day I will dig down further. But not now.