Because everyone wants their preferred set of tools/languages to do it using the design patterns they like and there is nothing wrong with that. I don't see myself using Beeware ever really but that doesn't mean people shouldn't work on it.
the last line of the comment you replied to gave a pretty good example: If you have tools build in tech X and just want to wrap them in a UI to make them usable on a phone. (similar to how Python ships with Tk bindings for UI: no, its not pretty, but it's an UI and thats what you want sometimes, without learning something big or worse a different tech stack)
In comparison to Python-for-Android with Kivy, the main thing that jumps out at me is the use of native UI (Kivy has its own UI, with KivyMD for Material Design theme).
Is it possible to use Python libraries with C dependencies (it's possible with P4A if there is the suitable recipe)?
What about the starting time compared to native apps?
Is it possible to run a Python service in the background?
Is there any collaboration done/possible with the great work made by Kivy team (Python-for-Android, Plyer, PyJNIus, etc)?
This is very interesting for someone who'd like to casually create a few apps on android for quality of life, but knows only Python and isn't interested in branching further.
1) how mature is the tool?
2) are there any established alternatives that this project is challenging?
On 2, Kivy [0] leaps to mind as a fairly mature cross-platform Python framework that covers iOS and Android. But like most of these things has a few rough edges.
There's also PySide for Android [1], which is also fairly mature but is... Much rougher. With a higher learning curve. And less iOS focused.
I just downloaded the example app called Travel Tips, and I get unreadable buttons and text because out-of-the-box, it apparently doesn't support dark mode.
When I turn it on, I get unequal padding between boxes and no native pickers, just a picker at the bottom of the iPhone.
When I run it on iPad, it boxes the content (two black bars left and right. The interface is simply stretched up, without regard for the huge space that the iPad offers.
Font sizes do not adjust with iOS settings, even if you restart the app.
This looks really good to be honest. So many projects I would have loved to create GUI's for and distribute that way but the overhead of having to sort out dependencies and packaging make it not feasible.
The key difference between Kivy and BeeWare is that BeeWare programs use the native UI toolkit of the platform they run on, whereas Kivy apps use a custom UI toolkit that uses the same controls across all platforms.
tifadg1 sums up my use case nicely:
> This is very interesting for someone who'd like to casually create a few apps on android for quality of life, but knows only Python and isn't interested in branching further.
I have some little python utilities that I’d love to have an iOS GUI wrapper for, but not enough to pay the $99 and learn something new.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keith_mage...
Also a note re their platform compatibility, it's not just Android and iOS: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web, and tvOS
Looks very interesting, going to give it a go adding guis to some existing cli python toys I've built