Quite a while ago I created a GUI micro-famework for Kodi mediacenter (formerly XBMC). At that time I tried to develop a subtitle addon for Addic7ed.com (which I did) and I needed to create a UI for the addon. Previously subtitle addons in Kodi had to have their own UI, so I used a several classes that Kodi-Python API provides and created a UI for my addon. Inspired with success (those were my first attempts to write something useful in Python) I decided to extend that UI to a micro-framework that would allow to create user interfaces for Kodi addon in pure Python without messing with XML skinning. I published my micro-framework on GitHub, submitted it to the Kodi official addon repository and created a topic on the Kodi official forum. I also used it in a couple of my personal projects, and that was all.
Honestly, I've always thought that PyXBMCt is a quite niche and rarely used library. Yes, people posted in my forum topic and asked questions, but I thought that they were just hobbyists like myself tinkering with their own personal projects. But recently I found out that you can view download stats for individual addons in the Kodi official repo. Naturally, I checked download stats for script.module.pyxbmct and was genuinely shocked by the number. Version 1.1.7 was installed more than 12 million (!) times on Kodi Jarvis only.
For comparison, the latest version (at the time of this post) of metadata.themoviedb.org addon that is shipped with every Kodi distributive was installed just above 30 million times. So it is safe to estimate that script.module.pyxbmct is installed on about 40% of all Kodi instances in the world, give or take.
At this moment I don't know which popular addons for Kodi use PyXBMCt but I intend to find out.
