December 2025 Status Update

Even with the impediment of end-of-year holidays restricting the availability of the core team, BeeWare has still seen some significant progress during December.

What we've done

• We adopted an updated Code of Conduct, incorporating changes from Contributor Covenant 3.0.
• We released Briefcase 0.3.26, Toga 0.5.3, and Rubicon Objective-C 0.5.3. These releases incorporate almost 4 months of changes.
• We simplified our Dependabot and pre-commit update tasks to minimise the number of updates that need to be processed every week.
• We rolled out a massive rework of our contribution guides. This update provides more comprehensive guidance on ways to contribute to BeeWare. It also allows us to share contribution content between projects, rather than duplicating that content.
• We updated Briefcase to use Chaquopy 17.0.0, enabling support for Python 3.14.
• We added the ability to debug Android applications with Briefcase.
• We modified Briefcase to verify system requirements when running briefcase dev on Linux. This should eliminate a common source of errors when running the BeeWare tutorial on Linux.
• We modified Briefcase's development mode to use an isolated virtual environment. This improves the correlation between the behavior of the development environment and the behavior of a packaged app.
• We added the ability to have uninstall options in MSI installers.
• We made significant improvements to Toga's Qt backend, adding PasswordInput, ProgressBar, NumberInput, DateInput and TimeInput, MultilineTextInput, WebView, Canvas, and Slider, Divider widgets, support for StatusIcon apps, and improved Font support.
• We released system-pyside6, a Python package allowing Python apps in a virtual environment to use the system-provided PySide6 libraries.
• We added initial support for Adwaita in the GTK4 backend.
• We modified Toga's image handling to ensure that image files aren't left open after loading.
• We corrected some edge cases in Toga's app name normalization.
• We added documentation for Toga's color API.
• We fixed the handling of nested OptionContainers on iOS 26+.
• We added the ability to control whether a WebView is allowed to navigate to a new URL.
• We added an API to determine the current backend being used by Toga.
• We corrected an error raised when the locale defined by the system is unknown or invalid.
• We improved the mechanism used to identify errors in the runtime Canvas tests.

What's next?

The holiday break means we haven't fully locked in our plans for January; but we're definitely expecting to see progress on Android packaging, and to wrap up some final work on iOS packaging. We expect to publish our full Q1 2026 goals late next week.

Want to get involved?

Want to get involved? We curate issues that should be approachable for first-time contributors to BeeWare. They're all relatively minor changes, but would provide a big improvement to the lives of BeeWare users:

• If you're interested in the tooling for deploying applications to various platforms, take a look at Briefcase
• Or, if you're interested in GUI widgets, take a look at Toga

These lists can also be filtered by platform - so you can find issues that are specific to your preferred operating system. Pick one of these tickets, drop a comment on the ticket to let others know you're looking at it, and try your hand at a PR! We have a guide on setting up a Briefcase development environment; but if you need any additional assistance or guidance, you can ask on the ticket, or join us on the BeeWare Discord server.