Building a macOS app with python - BeeWare vs Kivy vs Flet vs Swift
I tried to build a simple macOS app using F5 TTS MLX (a text-to-speech model optimized for Apple’s ML acceleration framework) for voice cloning, thinking it would be a quick evening project. After exploring BeeWare, Kivy, and Flet, here’s what I learned.
TL;DR: None of the Python GUI frameworks fully met my needs. BeeWare had the best developer experience, Flet had the nicest UI, but I’ll likely continue with a native Swift app calling (Python?) executables, lots of potential for someone like https://astral.sh/ (creators of modern Python tooling like Ruff and uv)!
My ranking is probably Native>BeeWare>Flet>>Kivy. Want to explore pure Flutter (Google’s UI toolkit for building natively compiled apps) too.
A simple voice cloning app where you can enter text, attach WAV files with voice samples (or use yt-dlp (a feature-rich YouTube video downloader) to extract them), and generate speech in the cloned voice.
“Write once. Deploy everywhere.” BeeWare lets you write native, cross-platform GUI applications in Python using platform-native widgets, so your apps look and feel at home on each platform.
