To answer your first question: yes, it is feasible to develop an Android app in pure Python , to achieve that, I suggest you use BeeWare , which is just a set of Python tools , which work very well together and allow you to develop native apps. of the platform in python.

check out this video from the creator of BeeWare who perfectly explains and demonstrates his application

How does it work

Android's preferred implementation language is Java, so if you want to write an Android app in Python, you must have a way to run your Python code in a Java virtual machine. This is what VOC does. VOC is a transpiler: it takes Python source code, compiles it into CPython Bytecode, and then transpiles that bytecode into Java-compatible bytecode. The end result is that your Python source files are compiled directly into a Java .class file, which can be packaged into an Android app.

VOC also allows you to access native Java objects as if they were Python objects, implement Java interfaces with Python classes, and subclass Java classes with Python classes. With this, you can write an Android app directly on the native Android APIs.

Once you've written your native Android app, you can use Briefcase to package your Python code as an Android app.

Briefcase is a tool to turn a Python project into a standalone native application. You can package projects for:

• Mac

• windows

• Linux

• iPhone/ iPad

• Android

• AppleTV

• tvOS.

You can check out this native Android Tic Tac Toe app written in Python, using the BeeWare suite. on GitHub

In addition to the BeeWare tools, you will need to have an Android JDK and SDK installed to test your application running.

and to answer your second question: a good environment can be anything you're comfortable with, be it a text editor and a command line, or an IDE, if you're looking for a good python IDE, I'd suggest try Pycharm , it has a community edition that is free and has a similar environment as Android Studio, due to the fact that they were created by the same company.

I hope this has been helpful.

You can try BeeWare , as described on their website:

Write your apps in Python and publish them to iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Web, and tvOS using rich, native user interfaces. A code base. Multiple applications.

It gives you what you want now for writing Android apps in Python, plus it has the advantage that you won't need to learn another framework in the future if you end up wanting to do something on one of the other platforms listed.

Here is the tutorial for android apps .

Android, Python !

When I saw these two keywords together in your question, Kivy is the one which came to my mind first.

Before coming to native Android development in Java using Android Studio, I had tried Kivy. It just awesome. Here are a few advantage I could find out.

Simple to use

With a python basics, you won't have trouble learning it.

Good community

It's well documented and has a great, active community.

Cross platform.

You can develop thing for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and even Raspberry Pi with this single framework. Open source.

It is a free software

At least few of it's (Cross platform) competitors want you to pay a fee if you want a commercial license.

Accelerated graphics support

Kivy's graphics engine build over OpenGL ES 2 makes it suitable for softwares which require fast graphics rendering such as games.

Now coming into the next part of question, you can't use Android Studio IDE for Kivy. Here is a detailed guide for setting up the development environment.