2025-09-13 –, Ballroom 3
One of the big features added in Python 3.13 is Tier 3 support for iOS and Android as platforms. This means you can now run Python code that uses the standard library on mobile devices without modification. However, most interesting projects also use code from PyPI... so how do you get that code to run on iOS and Android? How do you even produce a wheel in the first place?
In this talk, you'll learn about the eccentricities of iOS and Android as Python platforms, and what is involved in generating Python wheels that can be used for iOS and Android. You'll be introduced to cibuildwheel, a tool that can dramatically simplify the process of building wheels; and how to configure cibuildwheel to build iOS and Android wheels. Lastly, you'll be shown how to add these wheels to your own projects while you wait for official versions to be published.
Although this talk is presented primarily for the benefit of people who may want to add iOS and Android Python support to a package, it also serves as an introduction (or refresher on recent changes in standards) to Python packaging for desktop platforms.
Dr Russell Keith-Magee is the founder of the BeeWare project, a project developing GUI tools and libraries to support the development of Python software on desktop and mobile platforms. He joined the Django core team in 2006, and was the President of the Django Software Foundation for 5 years. He joined the CPython core team in 2024. He is a frequent speaker at Python and Django conferences around the globe, sharing his experience as a FLOSS developer, community maintainer, and (unsuccessful) startup founder. In his day job, he is a Principal Engineer at Anaconda, working on BeeWare in the OSS team.