Provide support for iOS wheels

[ydesgagn]

Expected behaviour

Would it be possible to add support to target iOS with:

• iphoneos arm64
• iphonesimulator arm64
• iphonesimulator x86_64

OpenCV for iOS is distributed as a framework and it's working well. So it should be possible to modify the Python part to build it.

Actual behaviour

All attempts at building failed.

Issue submission checklist

• This is not a generic OpenCV usage question (looking for help for coding, other usage questions, homework etc.)
• I have read the README of this repository and understand that this repository provides only an automated build toolchain for OpenCV Python packages (there is no actual OpenCV code here)
• The issue is related to the build scripts in this repository, to the pre-built binaries or is a feature request (such as "please enable this additional dependency")
• I'm using the latest version of opencv-python

[VadimLevin]

Thanks for valuable suggestion, can you provide at least 1 example of such library?
What is a use case for Python bindings on iOS?

[ydesgagn]

We are using this to access OpenCV directly in Swift.

https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/d5/da3/tutorial_ios_install.html

In our case, we write a lot of Python related code for AI and data sciences for proof of concepts. When this is production ready we embed some of the Python code (not UI) to iOS with Briefcase (https://beeware.org/project/projects/tools/briefcase/) using numpy, sklearn or scipy. To do that, we need pre-built native wheels for iOS. In this specific case, the Python OpenCV wheel would be required to do image processing and curve fitting (not possible with other libraries).

[VadimLevin]

Is it possible to build numpy iOS wheel? Quick search doesn't give any result

[ydesgagn]

Sure, check all the available wheels for iOS on this site.

https://anaconda.org/beeware/repo?sort=_name&sort_order=asc

They are adding more every month.

[timrid]

I am also looking for a way to use opencv on iOS.

FYI: The BeeWare team is working hard to advance iOS and Android support in the Python ecosystem:

• cibuildwheel supports iOS already in the current “main” branch. (see Add support for building iOS wheels. pypa/cibuildwheel#2286)
• an upload of .whl for iOS and Android at pypi.org is now already possible (see Add support for iOS and Android platform tags. pypi/warehouse#17559)