Python Standalone Builds for Android

This project produces standalone, redistributable builds of CPython for Android (Bionic), published in the shape of astral-sh/python-build-standalone.

Distributions follow the python-build-standalone archive contract — the same archive roots, flavor relationships, PYTHON.json metadata, artifact naming, and release model — so existing consumers work unchanged.

Quick start

Install a distribution with uv:

$ uv python install cpython-3.14.6-linux-aarch64-none \
    --python-downloads-json-url \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daylight-00/python-build-standalone-android/latest-release/download-metadata.json

That is the flagship build, which needs Android 14. For wider device coverage substitute download-metadata-upstream.json, the baseline, which needs Android 7 and is slower — see Choosing a build.

Or download an archive from the releases page and extract it:

$ tar -xzf cpython-3.14.6+<tag>-aarch64-linux-android-install_only.tar.gz
$ ./python/bin/python3

Builds

One triple, aarch64-linux-android, with a build option per distribution:

Build option	Produced from	Minimum Android	Status
upstream	the official Python.org Android package	7.0 (API 24)	published
(none)	CPython source	14 (API 34)	published
extended	CPython source, plus readline, Tk, uuid, Berkeley DB	14 (API 34)	planned

An earlier release, 20260728, carries the upstream build alone and was cut before the archives were byte-reproducible across machines. It is superseded and left in place: a published name has to keep serving the bytes it was published with, since the catalog pins them by hash.

The unmarked build is the flagship. Neither API level is chosen here — each follows a stated rule, described in the technical notes.

Documentation

• docs/index.md — where each document is
• docs/technotes.md — why the build is the way it is
• docs/distributions.md — the archive contract and its metadata
• docs/building.md — building and checking one yourself
• docs/quirks.md — where Android differs from a POSIX host
• docs/running.md — obtaining and running distributions
• docs/status.md — the supported runtime scope, and what is explicitly not supported

Design questions are settled in cpython-android-cli and land here only as build recipes.

Licensing

This repository's own source is MIT. The distributions it publishes contain third-party code under its own terms — CPython under the Python license, OpenSSL under Apache-2.0, and others. See docs/distributions.md for the full picture.