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

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