[Question]Why not use cibuildwheel. to compile whl for Android and ios

[yst-one]

Question

Why not use cibuildwheel. to compile whl for Android and ios

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• I have searched for answers to my question both in the issues and in previous discussions.

[FeodorFitsner]

cibuildwheel is for project maintainers - they are supposed to use it to build their multi-platform wheels and publish them to PyPI as it now supports hosting iOS, Android and Pyodide wheels. Project maintainers have control over their sources, build and publishing process. That's the big idea, big vision behind cibuildwheel.

But it's moving slowly. You can see here only a handful of packages produce iOS/Android wheels. I tell you it's a chicken-or-egg problem. To make projects investing their time to build iOS/Android wheels there must be an interest, right? How many "customers" are asking for mobile wheels? Flet is probably the biggest one today. Also, often projects developers don't have experience in iOS/Android at all despite cibuildwheel trying to make the process as easy as possible.

Flet users need iOS/Android wheels now, so we have to build them ourselves. Mobile Forge is a Swiss army knife for mass building wheels externally, when we don't have control over package sources and build process. In addition to building, mobile forge can download package sources from various sources (URL, GitHub, PyPI source distro, etc.), patch (more than 50% of packages can't be compiled without patching), build, optimize, restructure and clean. So, yeah, mobile forge is not a tool/product - it's a factory, bunch of scripts, tweaks and tricks. Because of it we could move fast. Hey, look we've just got all packages bumped to their latest versions and built for Python 3.12, 3.13 and 3.14! 🤗

[FeodorFitsner]

Oi, forgot to mention our CI monstrocity 👾 building all wheels for 3 pythons, continuously!