Python: Detect Android

Question

I'm surprised to find very little info on this topic. I want to detect if a user is running Android. I'm using:

platform.dist()

This perfectly detects all all OSs and different Linux distros. However, when running this on Android, it system name is always returned as "Linux". Is there any way to detect Android? I do not want to include any 3rd party modules, since this has to be as portable as possible. Is there maybe some specific Android function that I can call in a try-catch?

Answer 1

You can do this with Kivy

from kivy.utils import platform

if platform == 'android':
    # do something

EDIT:

As I said, I cannot use any 3rd party libs

Take a look at how Kivy implemented it.

def _get_platform():
    # On Android sys.platform returns 'linux2', so prefer to check the
    # presence of python-for-android environment variables (ANDROID_ARGUMENT
    # or ANDROID_PRIVATE).
    if 'ANDROID_ARGUMENT' in environ:
        return 'android'

Answer 2

As of Python 3.7, you can check for the existence of sys.getandroidapilevel():

import sys

if hasattr(sys, 'getandroidapilevel'):
    # Yes, this is Android
else:
    # No, some other OS