Support for Including Additional Python Libraries (e.g., NumPy, PySerial, Matplotlib) in Android Deployment

[Centralm4]

Hello,

First, thank you for your amazing work on this project! Your efforts to provide resources and tools for such a complex topic with limited documentation are truly appreciated.

I’m currently working on deploying a PySide-based desktop application to Android using your tool/repository. My app relies on several Python libraries in addition to PySide, including numpy, pyserial, serial, and matplotlib, and it runs perfectly on desktop. I’m wondering if it’s possible to include these additional libraries when deploying to Android, or if the deployment is limited to PySide modules only.

Could you kindly clarify:

Does your tool support including external Python libraries like numpy, pyserial, or matplotlib in Android builds?
If supported, are there specific steps or configurations (e.g., in sysroot.toml or the project file) to include these libraries?
Are there any known limitations or compatibility issues with these libraries on Android?
Thank you again for your time and dedication to this project. Any guidance or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,

[EchterAlsFake]

Hi, first of all, thanks for your feedback, really appreciate it. Regarding your question, yes it is possible, however, not that easy.

So, basically you can give any libraries into the buildozer.spec file which is created when compiling an Android app, however Qt starts the build process immediately without letting you change any of the stuff there. I don't know why they don't do that, but there's a workaround.

You need to modify the ˋandroid_deploy.pyˋ script inside of the ˋPySide6/scriptsˋ directory. It's somewhere in your Python installation. If you use a virtual environment it's like this:

ˋvenv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/PySide6/scripts/android_deploy.pyˋ

Once you open that file up, search for the line:

ˋlogging.info("[DEPLOY] Running buildozer deployment")ˋ

Once you found it, you need to write something to stop the process. You could for example write an input statement like this:

ˋinput("Modify buildozer file")ˋ

Now start the process with pyside6-android-deploy as usual and when you see your input statement, you can then modify the buildozer.spec file. There should be a line that has something like:

ˋrequirements = PySide6...ˋ

After the last requirement just add a comma and write your own additional dependencies.

Example:

Requirements = PySide6,shiboken6,colorama,matplotlib,httpx

However, there's a limitation. If the package you use, like numpy has C++ code and is not pure Python the compilation needs a special receipe for this package to make some modifications. For popular packages like numpy or httpx this should be done automatically, but it could also fail. In that case you need to do some research, but you'll get it working mostly.

So, another problem is, that buildozer sometimes fails to detect the dependency of a dependency. So for example, httpx also relies on h11, idna and httpcore. You also need to write them, otherwise your app will crash, although you did everything right. If that happens too you, just make some try and except when importing the package and send the error log to a server, or write it in memory idk. On my readme there's a guide on how to do logging with pure Python packages, so that should always work.

And another thing is also, that you need to make sure the packages match the architecture you are targeting. Usually all packages are compatible for all platforms but for example if you want to use the ˋrequestsˋ library for network requests, then you also need to add charset_normalizier into the requirements and only a very specific version of charset_normalizier is compatible with ˋaarch64ˋ. I think it was 2.2.1 but not sure.

However, Google is your best friend here.

I hope that helps so far. Let me know if you have any problems.