We’ve just released a new stable version of Kivy, version 1.9.1. You can see the changelog on the mailing list announcement, and download the new version from the Kivy website or via your package manager.
This is mainly a bugfix and tidying release following the major version 1.9 last year, but includes many bugfixes, smaller new features, and improvements to our surrounding infrastructure across almost 1000 new commits from over 70 different contributors.
One major improvement for Windows users is that we now have a fully working installation method using pip and wheels for both Kivy and its non-python binary dependencies, rather than our older standalone kivy distribution. This should make it easy to install Kivy in any existing Python installation. OS X distribution has also seen improvement, including better support for working with homebrew.
We’ve also improved app packaging particularly on OS X, with a new packaging method that should be easier than pyinstaller (though pyinstaller is still supported), a buildozer backend for OS X packaging (now buildozer works with Android, iOS and OS X!), and generally improved and updated documentation for the packaging process. The documentation for Windows and Linux packaging has similarly been updated, and the new packaging methods and buildozer support will hopefully be added for these in the future.
Packaging for Android with python-for-android is not tied to the Kivy update schedule in the same way, but has been seeing significant improvements and updates in the last few months, including a full revamp of the toolchain and support for many new features, which you can see in several of the recent previous posts on this blog.
In the future, we’re heading towards Kivy 2.0, which we’ve had in mind for a while to be a major release with some big new features and potentially removal of some long-deprecated components. We aren’t sure on the timescale for this yet, but if it takes too long there will be other minor releases first. For other updates, watch this blog or the standard Kivy support channels.
Thanks to all our contributors, and enjoy the new release!