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PyQt5 applications with pyqtdeploy on Android

This a small guide that explains how to deploy PyQt5 application to Android using pyqtdeploy. Keep in mind that this is not a Python/Qt/PyQt5 tutorial.

Reading list

Before doing anything read these docs, they get you up to speed how PyQt/Qt/Android works.

Setting up the environment

This guide was written using Ubuntu 20.04 however there is nothing platform specific here so it should work on almost any Linux-based system.

Install required dependencies

These are the required dependencies to build and deploy the example application to Android.

The following package versions are used in the guide

  • Python 3.7.7
  • Qt 5.13.2
  • PyQt 5.15.1
  • sip 4.9.24
  • pyqtdeploy 2.5.1
  • Android NDK r20b

Note: it's recommended to always use the latest PyQt5 source, it's compatible with older version.

System packages

sudo apt-get install clang make zlib1g zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libssl-dev openjdk-8-jdk build-essential git

Qt

Download the online installer from https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer and install it under ~/Qt. After the installation is completed there should be a MaintenanceTool binary in the Qt folder, run it.

Here you should install Qt 5.13.2 and only the Android related packages.

Note: a Qt account might be required.

Android SDK/NDK

Unfortunatelly things don't seem to work with the command line tool only so we need to download Android Studio from https://developer.android.com/studio and intall it to ~/Android.

After the installation is done run the following commands to update the Android SDK list and install the Android 29 platform.

~/Android/tools/tools/bin/sdkmanager --update
~/Android/tools/tools/bin/sdkmanager "platforms;android-28"

We also need to install an Android NDK, to do this go to https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/older_releases and download android-ndk-r20b and exract it to ~/Android.

The command cat ~/Android/android-ndk-r20b/source.properties should run successfully and show some data.

pip/pyqtdeploy

We need to have the latest pip and pyqtdeploy installed. You can install them in a virtualenv or not, up to you.

pip install -U pip
pip install pyqtdeploy==2.5.1 pyqt5

Note: the latest pyqtdeploy (3 and above) had some major changes, this guide will be updated to follow up with those.

Download source packages

For building the Android sysroot we will need the source packages of the libraries. Download the following files and put them in example/sources/ (the tar.gz/tgz versions)

Set environment variables

For pyqtdeploy to work properly we need to have some environment variables set

# required for pyqtdeploy
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=$HOME/Android/tools
export ANDROID_NDK_ROOT=$HOME/Android/android-ndk-r20b
export ANDROID_NDK_PLATFORM=android-29

# useful later, need to specify Qt dir while building sysroot
export QT_DIR=$HOME/Qt/5.13.2

# change this to point to the git repo
# useful for pyqtdeploy to know the example app's directory
export APP_DIR=$HOME/path-to/example/app

# for adb and androiddeployqt
export PATH=$HOME/Android/tools/platform-tools:$PATH
export PATH=$HOME/Qt/5.13.2/android_arm64_v8a/bin:$PATH

Building Android sysroot

Go to example/ directory and run the following command

pyqtdeploy-sysroot --target android-64 --source-dir sources/ --source-dir $QT_DIR --verbose sysroot.json

Building the application

pyqtdeploy-build  --target android-64 --verbose --no-clean app.pdy
cd build-android-64
qmake
make -j2
make install INSTALL_ROOT=app
# 29 as in android-29, libmain comes from the entrypoint name in the .pdy file
androiddeployqt --gradle --android-platform 29 --input android-libmain.so-deployment-settings.json --output app

To install it to your device run (might need to enable developer mode and USB debugging on your phone, after that it works via USB or over TCP too)

adb devices
adb install app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Adding Android specific things

In order to customize our application (name, logo, custom permissions) we need to create our own AndroidManifest.xml and also in the long term it's better to have our own custom Activity inheried from QtActivity.

To create these custom files we need to specifiy ANDROID_PACKAGE_SOURCE_DIR (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/deployment-android.html#android-specific-qmake-variables) in qmake variables (the .pdy file has a separate tab for it).

First copy $QT_DIR/android_arm64_v8a/src/android/templates/AndroidManifest.xml to example/android_source/.

Then create ExampleActivity.java in example/android_source/src/org/kviktor/example/ with the following content

package org.kviktor.example;


public class ExampleActivity extends org.qtproject.qt5.android.bindings.QtActivity
{
    private static ExampleActivity m_instance;

    public ExampleActivity()
    {
        m_instance = this;
    }
}

This one just extends the original QtActivity class and saves a reference to itself in a static variable (this will come in handy later).

In AndroidManifest.xml change org.qtproject.qt5.android.bindings.QtActivity to org.kviktor.example.ExampleActivity.