r/Python • u/crmaureir Pythonista • Jul 30 '26

Discussion Python iOS UI development

Hey there,

for the people using PySide for UI applications, after having solely Android support, there was a new announcement that iOS is now supported, and will be available in the upcoming PySide release:
https://www.qt.io/blog/python-mobile-app-development-bringing-pyside6-on-ios

I have been following the work by the BeeWare project, which has been providing iOS support for some time now: https://toga.beeware.org/en/latest/reference/platforms/iOS/ and recently the work from the Flet team as well: https://flet.dev/blog/flet-for-ios/

What I wanted to achieve with this post, is to know any project that you know is currently on iOS and developed with Python and some UI framework, because time to time we see nice "calculator app" being showcases in places, but a more official application of something is what I have been failing to find.

Of course, the goal of "I have my code here, and I just want to deploy it to iOS" is completely understandable, but I see haven't found some very cool apps somewhere, that we know are based on Python.

Last but not least, I guess you have been noticed that starting from 3.15 we will be able to download Python for iOS from python.org: https://www.python.org/downloads/ios/

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u/riklaunim Jul 30 '26

PySide isn't that old to have "legacy" applications, and switching between PyQt and PySide should be rather easy if the app isn't using some PyQt internals.

The comment is a bit weird, as you don't need Python to port Qt (C++) apps to mobile. PyQt has a weird/complex build system for mobile (a.k.a. pay Riverbank to help you with it), and PySide has this thing now.

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u/sausix Jul 30 '26

I asked because many people still don't know about PySide and its benefits over PyQt.

Porting to PySide is in fact quite easy.

If PyQt had better monile support before this anouncement then it had one pro over PySide.

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u/riklaunim Jul 30 '26

PyQt has the advantage of direct commercial support, and that is the business model of Riverbank (and it seems to be working). Unsure how they are doing now, but in the past it was pretty agile development.

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u/crmaureir Pythonista 29d ago

Hey, I'm interested to hear more about the "direct commercial support", how that would be different from what The Qt Company provides?

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u/riklaunim 29d ago

Qt Company provides rather more for C++ Qt, while Riverbank supports PyQt, their build and bindings systems. And they have a long history - it can be different now, but for many years there was only Riverbank and companies/developers learned to work with them and their systems.

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u/crmaureir Pythonista 19d ago

I see, but the Qt Company is in charge of the PySide development, which is included in the Qt Commercial Licenses too, with not specialized license. PySide also offers the binding generator tool, Shiboken, which is General Purpose, and can expose Non Qt C++ projects to Python!