Ren'Py support devices running the Android operating system, such as smartphones and tablets. While these devices do not support 100% of Ren'Py's functionality, with minimal modification visual novels can be packaged and ported to these devices.
RAPT – the Ren'Py Android Packaging Tool – is a program, downloaded separately from Ren'Py, that creates an Android package for testing or release purposes.
Some of the libraries used by RAPT are licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License. You'll need to comply with the terms of that license to distribute Ren'Py. We believe including the following language in your app's description will suffice, but check with a lawyer to be sure.
This program contains free software licensed under a number of licenses, including the GNU Lesser General Public License. A complete list of software is available at https://www.renpy.org/l/license/.
When a Ren'Py game has been launched on Android, the following keybindings work:
There are many important differences between the touch-based Android platform and the mouse-based platforms that Ren'Py supports. Changes due to the Android software and hardware are:
renpy.input()
) is limited to the input methods
that do not require completions to work. (Western languages probably work,
while other languages might not.)In addition, there are a few changes that may be necessary due to human factors:
To help you adapt to these differences, Ren'Py for Android automatically selects screen variants based on the device's screen size and capabilities. See Screen Variants for more information.
Due to the security policy of mobile devices, MultiPersistent functionality is limited only to this game and its updates, i.e. it cannot be shared by another game.
For testing purposes, Ren'Py supports three Android emulation modes. These are accessed from the Android screen of the launcher.
This mode emulates a television-based Android device, such as the OUYA console. The keyboard is mapped to remote or controller input, with the arrow keys providing navigation. Select is enter, Escape is menu, and page-up is back.
This mode also displays an overlay showing the Television-unsafe area. Content in the Television-unsafe area may not display on all Televisions.
While these emulators can be used to quickly test your project, it's best to also test on real hardware. The emulators do not deal with some human-factors issues, like the size of a user's fingers.
Ren'Py contains tools that help you take a packaging-centric approach to Android game development. In this approach, you will use a PC to build an Android package and upload it to your device. You can then run the game like any Android application. When it works correctly, you can upload the package you make to Google Play and other app stores.
Building an Android application consists of four steps:
Once you've finished these steps, you'll have a runnable Android package. You'll only need to run step 3 when you decide to make changes to your game's configuration or when configuring a new game entirely; you'll run step 4 most often, whenever you need to make a new build of your game.
There are three things you may need to manually download and install before you can build packages:
Java Development Kit. The Java Development Kit (JDK) contains several tools that are used by RAPT, including the tools used to generate keys and sign packages. It can be downloaded from:
You'll need version 8 of the JDK.
Please note that the developer-focused JDK is different from the user-focused JRE, and you'll need the JDK to create Android packages.
Android Device. You'll also want to set your device up for development. You'll want to enable developer mode on your device, and set up your computer for Android development. Instructions on how to set up your computer can be found at:
You can also run your app in an x86_64 image on the Android emulator (note that x86 is not supported). Setting the emulator up is outside of the scope of this document.
The next step is to set up the Android SDK and the rest of your development environment. This step will:
This step requires Internet access.
To perform this step, choose "Install SDK & Create Keys" from the Android screen in the Ren'Py Launcher.
RAPT will report on what it's doing. It will also prompt you with warnings about licenses, and ask if you want it to generate a key.
Warning
The key generated by RAPT is created with a standard passphrase. You should really use keytool to generate your own signing keys.
At the very least, you should keep the android.keystore and bundle.keystore files in a safe place. You should also back it up, because without the key, you won't be able to upload the generated applications.
When creating Android keys, Ren'Py will back them up to the same place it backs up script files. This isn't a substitute for making your own backups.
If you don't want to download the SDK each time, you can create a file named sdk.txt containing a single line that is the path to the already-installed SDK.
Before building a package, you must give Ren'Py some information about the Android build of your game. To do this, choose "Configure" from the Android screen of the Ren'Py launcher.
If you need to change the information – for example, if you release a new version of your game – you can re-run the configure command. Your previous choices will be remembered.
Finally, you can build and install the package. You'll first want to choose between one of the two release modes:
Play bundle releases are in the Android App Bundle (AAB) format, and are suitable only for upload to the Google Play store, though such releases can also be installed on Play-enabled Android devices.
Play bundles may be up to 2 GB in size, but this is divided into 4 500MB fast-follow pack files, with each file in your game assigned to one of the four bundles. This may be an issue with four files - a game won't be able to fit 5 files of 300 MB in size, as there will only be room for one in each of the four pack files.
Universal APK release are suitable for direct installation onto Android devices, either through Ren'Py, ADB, non-Play app stores, or sideloading through the web.
Universal APKs can be up to 2 GB in size, with no restrictions on the contents.
There are three commands which allow you to perform various combinations of building the package, installing it on your device, and launching the application for testing.
You may need to uninstall the app when switching between release modes.
Ren'Py will create an icon from your app from two files in the game's base directory:
Android adaptive icons work by masking the two layers of the icon to an area that is at least 132x132 pixels, in the center. The area outside of this safe space may be shown, but it might be masked out, too. Bleeding outside of the safe area is encouraged. The two layers might move a little relative to each other when the icon is dragged around.
For more information about adaptive icons, please check out:
Note that 1dp corresponds to 4 actual pixels.
When generating the application, Ren'Py will convert these files to an appropriate size for each device, and will generate static icons for devices that do not support adaptive icons.
The presplash is shown before Ren'Py fully loads, before the main splashscreen starts. It's especially important on Android, as the first time Ren'Py runs it will unpack supporting files, which make take some time.
The image that's used when the app is downloading assets from Google Play Asset delivery. This should be surrounded by 1px of a monocolored border. When displayed, the image is scaled to fit available space while preserving aspect ratio, and the rest of the screen is filled with the border color.
A 20px-high progress bar is displayed 20px from the bottom, left, and right sides of the screen, showing download progress.
When running on Android, a version of the Pyjnius library is available. This allows advanced creators to call into the Android libraries.
It may be necessary to get the main activity. It can be found in the mActivity field in the org.renpy.android.PythonSDLActivity class. For example:
init python:
if renpy.android:
import jinus
mActivity = jnius.autoclass("org.renpy.android.PythonSDLActivity")
else:
mActivity = None
While Ren'Py doesn't require additional permissions to run, if your game uses Pyjnius to call into Android, it might be necessary to request permissions. Ren'Py has a variable and two functions to interact with the Android permissions system.
build.android_permissions
= [ ] linkThis is a list of strings, with each string giving the full name of an Android permission. For example, "android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE". This simply declares that the application might request these permissions, it's necessary to use renpy.check_permission and renpy.request_permission as necessary to request the permission.
When your Android device is connected to your computer over USB, and configured to allow access to file storage, there are some directories that files can be placed in. (This assumes that your game's package is org.renpy.mygame, but it will almost certainly be different.)