I made one, and then I contributed some stuff to kivy, and then I became a core developer. So, I guess it went pretty well.

One thing I've done is a series of video tutorials that you might find useful.

I know it will be hard

I'd actually say that the process of making a working app and running it on an android device is remarkably easy in general. That's what I covered in the first 20 minutes of (real time) video tutorial just to try and demonstrate how cool it is.

Of course, building any non-trivial app needs a lot of learning in any toolkit, just to get an idea of good ways to work and fit things together. I think kivy is mostly very reasonable about this, it has a simple but pythonic api and optional-but-recommended language for declaring widget trees without all the python boilerplate.

Kivy also has an excellent, active community, so don't be afraid to ask questions on the irc channel or mailing list.

Kivy is not designed for game design. It's designed for standard everyday apps. The impression might get caused by kivy mostly showing games in the gallery, but that's just because a lot of users like to create games. Has nothing to do with the intention of kivy itself :) Another reason why a lot of people think that kivy is heavily designed for games is that it uses pygame as a background service. Most users don't know that kivy just uses pygame to draw on a window. It doesn't even give you the ability to use pygame features yourself. It's basically just a background provider for a drawable surface!

The only problem I see with using kivy for everyday apps is the slow startup. That might be a reason to develop the app in a different language (especially when it's supposed to be an app that you open and close very often each day)

So:

• Apps that get opened/closed really often -> Might consider switching to a different framework/language. Perhaps the native Java app thing.

• Apps that you open less often (so you can live with the startup time) or if you don't care about the startup time: use kivy!