Kivy – buildozer android debug failed with libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file

Last updated on 23. March 2014

Kivy is awesome library for developing GUI applications in Python.

It’s possible to build same application for desktop, Android or iOS. It’s something like Cordova/PhoneGap for JavaScript.

I was following Kivy crash course 2: Building an android apk tutorial recorded by Alexander Taylor.

I was trying to build application on Linux Debian for Android:

buildozer android debug

Build failed with quite strange message:

[mergemanifest] Manifest merger disabled. Using project manifest only.
     [echo] Handling aidl files...
     [aidl] Found 1 AIDL files.
     [aidl] Compiling 1 AIDL files.
     [aidl] /home/georgik/.buildozer/android/platform/android-sdk-21/platform-tools/aidl: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

BUILD FAILED

assets/private.mp3: /home/georgik/idea/kivytest/.buildozer/android/app/sitecustomize.pyo
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "build.py", line 431, in 
    make_package(args)
  File "build.py", line 346, in make_package
    subprocess.check_call([ANT, arg])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['ant', 'debug']' returned non-zero exit status 1

The reason of this problem is not so obvious.

My operating system is 64bit, but Android build system requires 32 bit version of stdc++ library.

Fix is very easy. Just install lib32stdc++6 package :-)

apt-get install lib32stdc++6

If build is still failing, because of other missing libraries, then you can use online Debian package search to find missing dependencies: https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Other missing 32bit libraries are often libz, libncurses5:

apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5