it’s just a lot of complexity, especially if you’re targeting only Android. it’s single threaded and not native to the platform. you’ll be behind on platform versions and have to find shims for everything. you’ll run into weird issues for which the fixes are not supported by the native platform. the more layers you put in between you and the native runtime, the more things can go wrong

Android Studio and Jetpack Compose is going to be the path of least resistance, but i’d need to hear more requirements to make a real recommendation (besides try to avoid React Native unless you have a really good reason)

back in the day it wasn’t clear that Google wanted a strong monopoly control over Android. Amazon was just another contender in the ecosystem.

i mean, you’re right. i’m just saying it’s a little silly to ship a Python interpreter when there are easier, better supported ways to do the same thing.

looks like tesseract provides C bindings which are probably being utilized in those apps.

no need for Python. there’s a Google SDK, ML Kit, that will do the heavy lifting on this. if that’s not acceptable, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX support Android, albeit not as nicely integrated.

your image processing pipeline will be imageSource -> RGB encoding -> OCR -> profit. your OCR just needs an RGB encoded image. doesn’t matter if that’s a JPEG or YUV video feed at the source.

as for if there’s an app that fits OP’s exact use case, dunno.

used to be the Android team used Ubuntu, not sure if that’s still the case. Linux is pretty much the native environment for Android dev. i’d recommend at least 4GB of dedicated RAM if not 8. definitely at least 8 if you plan to use the emulator (which is itself a VM).

Android Studio will get you 90% of the way there. it will help you install the SDK, emulators, etc, and provide UI front ends for the CLI tools, ie adb.

there’s really not much to system level dependencies. if your distribution supports JDK 17 (probable) you’ll be fine with whatever.

obligatory: i use Arch, btw