Python 3 Android - DEPRECATED

October 23, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

This project has been deprecated in favor of the official Python support for Android.

This is an experimental set of build scripts that will cross-compile Python 3.13.0 for an Android device.

Building requires:

  1. Linux. This project might work on other systems supported by NDK but no guarantee.
  2. Android NDK r28 installed and environment variable $ANDROID_NDK points to its root directory. Older NDK may not work and NDK <= r18 is known to be incompatible.
    An example of how to set the environment variable would be export ANDROID_NDK="/home/myuser/android-ndk-r28-linux" >> $HOME/.bashrc

Running requires: -----
  1. Android 11 (Red Velvet Cake, API 30) or above
  2. arm, arm64, x86, x86_64

Build -----
  1. Run sudo ./clean.sh for good measure, and after each build.
  2. You will need a separate build run for every API Level/architecture combination you wish to run on:
    Here are a couple of examples to build a static version of the library with docker.
    • Build 64 bit sudo docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/python3-android -v /mnt/c/SPE/android-ndk-r28 --env ARCH=arm64 --env ANDROID_API=30 --env ANDROID_NDK=/android-ndk-r28 python:3.13.0-slim /python3-android/docker-build.sh --enable-shared --without-ensurepip --disable-ipv6 --with-build-python
    • Build x86_64 sudo docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/python3-android -v /mnt/c/SPE/android-ndk-r28 --env ARCH=x86_64 --env ANDROID_API=30 --env ANDROID_NDK=/android-ndk-r28 python:3.13.0-slim /python3-android/docker-build.sh --enable-shared --without-ensurepip --disable-ipv6 --with-build-python

Installation & Running

  1. This project has a sample application. It is most likely out of date file wise, but it is a good starting point to understand how to use it.
  2. Make sure adb shell works fine
  3. Copy all files in build to a folder on the device (e.g., /data/local/tmp/python3). Note that on most devices /sdcard is not on a POSIX-compliant filesystem, so the python binary will not run from there.
  4. In adb shell:
cd /data/local/tmp/build
. ./env.sh
python3

And have fun!

SSL/TLS

SSL certificates have old and new naming schemes. Android uses the old scheme yet the latest OpenSSL uses the new one. If you got CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED when using SSL/TLS in Python, you need to collect system certificates:

cd /data/local/tmp/build
mkdir -p etc/ssl
cat /system/etc/security/cacerts/* > etc/ssl/cert.pem

Path for certificates may vary with device vendor and/or Android version. Note that this approach only collects system certificates. If you need to collect user-installed certificates, most likely root access on your Android device is needed.

Check SSL/TLS functionality with:

import urllib.request
print(urllib.request.urlopen('https://httpbin.org/ip').read().decode('ascii'))

Known Issues

No big issues! yay