Troubleshooting

Debug output

Add the --debug option to any python-for-android command to see full debug output including the output of all the external tools used in the compilation and packaging steps.

If reporting a problem by email or Discord, it is usually helpful to include this full log, e.g. via a pastebin or Github gist.

Debugging on Android

When a python-for-android APK doesn’t work, often the only indication that you get is that it closes. It is important to be able to find out what went wrong.

python-for-android redirects Python’s stdout and stderr to the Android logcat stream. You can see this by enabling developer mode on your Android device, enabling adb on the device, connecting it to your PC (you should see a notification that USB debugging is connected) and running adb logcat. If adb is not in your PATH, you can find it at /path/to/Android/SDK/platform-tools/adb, or access it through python-for-android with the shortcut:

python-for-android logcat

or:

python-for-android adb logcat

Running logcat command gives a lot of information about what Android is doing. You can usually see important lines by using logcat’s built in functionality to see only lines with the python tag (or just grepping this).

When your app crashes, you’ll see the normal Python traceback here, as well as the output of any print statements etc. that your app runs. Use these to diagnose the problem just as normal.

The adb command passes its arguments straight to adb itself, so you can also do other debugging tasks such as python-for-android adb devices to get the list of connected devices.

For further information, see the Android docs on adb, and on logcat in particular.

Unpacking an APK

It is sometimes useful to unpack a packaged APK to see what is inside, especially when debugging python-for-android itself.

APKs are just zip files, so you can extract the contents easily:

unzip YourApk.apk

At the top level, this will always contain the same set of files:

$ ls
AndroidManifest.xml  classes.dex  META-INF     res
assets               lib          YourApk.apk  resources.arsc

The user app data (code, images, fonts ..) is packaged into a single tarball contained in the assets folder:

$ cd assets
$ ls
private.tar

private.tar is a tarball containing all your packaged data. Extract it:

$ tar xf private.tar

This will reveal all the user app data (the files shown below are from the touchtracer demo):

$ ls
README.txt            android.txt             icon.png                main.pyc                p4a_env_vars.txt        particle.png
private.tar           touchtracer.kv

Due to how We’re required to ship ABI-specific things in Android App Bundle, the Python installation is packaged separately, as (most of it) is ABI-specific.

For example, the Python installation for arm64-v8a is available in lib/arm64-v8a/libpybundle.so

libpybundle.so is a tarball (but named like a library for packaging requirements), that contains our _python_bundle:

$ tar xf libpybundle.so
$ cd _python_bundle
$ ls
modules               site-packages   stdlib.zip

FAQ

Check out the online FAQ for common errors.