September 2025 Status Update

September has been a busy month for conference travel, but we've also managed to make some important improvements to projects in the BeeWare ecosystem.

What we've done

• We attended PyCon AU, giving a presentation about the process of creating Android and iOS wheels.
• We attended the CPython core team summit at the ARM campus in Cambridge, UK. This was an opportunity to finalise work on the upcoming 3.14 release, and discuss plans for the 3.15 release cycle. We also gave a short presentation about the state of the cross-compilation ecosystem in Python.
• We attended PyCon UK, giving a presentation about writing GUI apps in Python.
• We made the first releases of our new cross-platform build management project, xbuild. At this point, xbuild can be used to create cross-platform virtual environments, and to drive compilation of binary wheels on iOS and Android.
• We added code to CPython to manage the compilation of an iOS XCframework artefact. This change also involved a significant reorganisation of the iOS code so that other Apple backends (tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and MacCatalyst) can be added, sharing the same XCframework and testbed tooling. This is also an important step towards adding iOS builds to Python's CI matrix, and towards producing iOS binary artefacts as part of the CPython release process.
• We added code to CPython that handles Apple's recently announced requirement for Privacy Manifests.
• We updated CPython's Android CI to use the same set of test options as the other platforms.
• We contributed changes to CMake improving the handling of Android Python modules.
• We added an ActivityIndicator widget for Android.
• We improved the size hinting of DateInput and TimeInput widgets on iOS.
• We enabled focus handling on Table and Tree widgets on desktop platforms.
• We investigated a number of reported issues relating to the macOS and iOS 26 releases, the rollout of the new "Liquid Glass" style, and what BeeWare needs to do in order to comply with this new style.
• We continued to make progress on migrating BeeWare's documentation to use Markdown, instead of Restructured Text. A lot of the effort over the last month has related to translation tooling; but we're almost ready to switch the BeeWare tutorial over to the Markdown version. We've also made some progress on migrating Toga's documentation to Markdown. This is a much bigger project as it involves API documentation, and much more complex cross-linking relationships.
• We performed some initial investigations into post-install and pre-uninstall scripting on Windows. This work should yield results in the coming month.

What's next?

With conference season over for another year, we'll be able to give our full focus to making improvements on BeeWare and related projects. In the next month, we're hoping to wrap up our work on adding post-install and pre scripts to Briefcase's Windows installers. October will also see the release of Python 3.14.0, and there will be some work related to finalizing BeeWare's support of that release. We also hope to start looking at the tooling for building Rust packages for iOS and Android.

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.