Skip to content

Using Kivy and Buildozer to Build Android APK

  • Environment:
    • Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo
    • Python 3.7.3
    • kivy 1.10.1
    • buildozer 0.39

My First Android Application Ever Built

Buildozer Install

pip3 install buildozer

Get Kivy program

Using https://github.com/kivy/kivy/tree/master/examples/demo/pictures

Configure Buildozer

buildozer init
vim buildozer.spec

Prepare to build

As advised on Buildozer Doc, Android on Ubuntu 18.04 (64bit) should install:

sudo pip install --upgrade cython==0.28.6
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential ccache git libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libpangox-1.0-0:i386 libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386

buildozer -v android debug

This will download Android SDK, NDK, and others tools, taking your ~/.buildozer about 3.9GB space and ./.buildozer about 1.3 GB, if you have only python3 and pip3 installed.

It may crash though, please make sure there is no [WARNING] telling you to install packages, and Google often.

If it says that there is no file called xyz.so, you can try:

locate xyz.so
ln -s path/to/exist/so /usr/lib/xyz.so

If you are inside some kind of great firewall, try in morning will speed the downloading process up.

Install and Test

Finally, you will find a apk file inside ./bin directory.

You sure can upload it to a cloud and download it to your android device as I previously did, but I strongly recommend you to enable USB debug mode on your android phone and connect to your PC / laptop. And run:

buildozer android deploy

Then the android apk will be transmitted to your android device and install. Then run:

buildozer android run logcat 2>&1 >/dev/null | grep 'python' > filter.out

Note:

  • an android device can only connect to a virtual machine or the PC at one time, configure it carefully

  • buildozer writes adb logcat info to STDERR, so use 2>&1 to redirect it to STDOUT

  • use grep to get all info related to python, since logcat has too much info to read
  • logcat won't stop automatically, so kill it when your app fiinishes
  • finally, write all to a file to be easily read.

About Kivy Version

I ran buildozer to build an example apk before installing kivy via pip, so my next app crashed because of requirement error. So I have to install the specific version of kivy.