Hi Nathan,
The method of consumption is basically the same as on desktop platforms: a
developer runs pip or uv, and it downloads the wheel from a repository and
installs it into an environment. This can be done natively on a mobile
device using apps like Termux which provide a fairly conventional
development environment. Or it can be done on a desktop machine using the
other projects I mentioned, which build the environment into a mobile app
which can be distributed on an app store to end users who might not even
know they're using Python.
Right now each of those projects is maintaining a limited set of binary
Python packages that they support on mobile. Every new package, and every
new version of each package, takes up our time. With 100 or so packages
currently supported, even updating them once per year is about as much as
we can keep up with, but our users are constantly asking for more. And to
make using Python on mobile realistic for most applications, I think we'd
need to push that number closer to 1000.
The only feasible way to achieve that is to remove ourselves as the
bottleneck, and have each upstream project release wheels for mobile on
PyPI in the same way as all the other platforms.
-- Malcolm Smith
On Wed, 4 Nov 2026 at 19:51, Nathan via NumPy-Discussion <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Can you explain a little more what the concrete upside is here? For
> context: I've never built a phone app, let alone tried to consume a ios or
> android wheel.
>
> How would a developer targeting ios or android consume the PyPI wheels and
> why is what they currently do a big pain for downstream?
>
> Building new wheels is a concrete ongoing commitment from us.
>
> One thing I've noticed is that ths ios builds in CI are often blocked on
> available Mac GitHub runners but that's a very minor issue. Still, it'd be
> nice to figure out how to run fewer Mac CI jobs or exploit parallelism more
> efficiently.
>
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2026 at 6:26 AM Malcolm Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> As you may remember, Android and iOS support was merged into NumPy a few
>> months ago, and both of them were added to NEP 57 as Tier 3 platforms. As
>> far as I'm aware, they've both been running reliably in CI since then, so
>> I'd like to propose moving them to Tier 2 and releasing their wheels on
>> PyPI starting with NumPy 2.6 next month.
>>
>> This will allow users of Termux, Chaquopy, BeeWare and Kivy to obtain
>> up-to-date versions of NumPy, without each of those projects needing to
>> maintain their own builds as they've been doing until now.
>>
>> Let me know if you have any questions.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Malcolm
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