androidpythonoperating-systemdetect

Python: Detect Android

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?

Solution

  • 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'