iOS Xcode project¶
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When generating an iOS project, Briefcase produces an Xcode project.
Icon format¶
iOS projects use .png
format icons. An application must provide icons of
the following sizes:
20px
29px
40px
58px
60px
76px
80px
87px
120px
152px
167px
180px
640px
1024px
1280px
1920px
The icon will also be used to populate the splash screen. You can specify a
background color for the splash screen using the splash_background_color
configuration setting.
iOS projects do not support installer images.
Colors¶
iOS allows for some customization of the colors used by your app:
splash_background_color
is the color of the splash background that displays while an app is loading.
Additional options¶
The following options can be provided at the command line when producing iOS projects:
run¶
-d <device>
/ --device <device>
¶
The device simulator to target. Can be either a UDID, a device name (e.g.,
"iPhone 11"
), or a device name and OS version ("iPhone 11::iOS 13.3"
).
Application configuration¶
The following options can be added to the tool.briefcase.app.<appname>.iOS.app
section of your pyproject.toml
file.
info
¶
A property whose sub-attributes define keys that will be added to the app’s
Info.plist
file. Each entry will be converted into a key in the entitlements
file. For example, specifying:
info."UIFileSharingEnabled" = true
will result in an Info.plist
declaration of:
<key>UIFileSharingEnabled</key><true/>
Any Boolean or string value can be used for an Info.plist
value.
Permissions¶
Briefcase cross platform permissions map to the following info
keys:
camera
:NSCameraUsageDescription
microphone
:NSMicrophoneUsageDescription
coarse_location
-NSLocationDefaultAccuracyReduced=True
-NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
iffine_location
is not definedfine_location
-NSLocationDefaultAccuracyReduced=False
-NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
background_location
: -NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription
-NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
if neitherfine_location
orcoarse_location
is set -UIBackgroundModes
will includelocation
andprocessing
photo_library
:NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription
Platform quirks¶
Availability of third-party packages¶
Briefcase is able to use third-party packages in iOS apps. As long as the package is
available on PyPI, or you can provide a wheel file for the package, it can be added to
the requires
declaration in your pyproject.toml
file and used by your app at
runtime.
If the package is pure Python (i.e., it does not contain a binary library), that’s all
you need to do. To check whether a package is pure Python, look at the PyPI downloads
page for the project; if the wheels provided are have a -py3-none-any.whl
suffix,
then they are pure Python wheels. If the wheels have version and platform-specific
extensions (e.g., -cp311-cp311-macosx_11_0_universal2.whl
), then the wheel contains
a binary component.
If the package contains a binary component, that wheel needs to be compiled for iOS. PyPI does not currently support uploading iOS-compatible wheels, so you can’t rely on PyPI to provide those wheels. Briefcase uses a secondary repository to store pre-compiled iOS wheels.
This repository is maintained by the BeeWare project, and as a result, it does not have binary wheels for every package that is available on PyPI, or even every version of every package that is on PyPI. If you see the message:
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement <package name> (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for <package name>
then the package (or the version that you’ve specified) probably isn’t supported yet.
It is usually possible to compile any binary package wheels for iOS, depending on the
requirements of the package itself. If the package has a dependency on other binary
libraries (e.g., something like libjpeg
that isn’t written in Python), those
libraries will need to be compiled for iOS as well. However, if the library requires
build tools that don’t support iOS, such as a compiler that can’t target iOS, or a
PEP517 build system that doesn’t support cross-compilation, it may not be possible to
build an iOS wheel.
The BeeWare Project provides the Mobile Forge project to assist with cross-compiling iOS binary wheels. This repository contains recipes for building the packages that are stored in the secondary package repository. Contributions of new package recipes are welcome, and can be submitted as pull requests. Or, if you have a particular package that you’d like us to support, please visit the issue tracker and provide details about that package.
Requirements cannot be provided as source tarballs¶
Briefcase cannot install packages published as source tarballs into an iOS app, even
if the package is a pure Python package that would produce a py3-none-any
wheel.
This is an inherent limitation in the use of source tarballs as a distribution format.
If you need to install a package in an iOS app that is only published as a source
tarball, you’ll need to compile that package into a wheel first. If the package is pure
Python, you can generate a py3-none-any
wheel using pip wheel <package name>
. If
the project has a binary component, you’ll need to use Mobile Forge (or similar tooling) to compile compatible
wheels.
You can then directly add the wheel file to the requires
definition for your app, or
put the wheel in a folder and add:
requirement_installer_args = ["--find-links", "<path-to-wheel-folder>"]
to your pyproject.toml
. This will instruct Briefcase to search that folder for
compatible wheels during the installation process.