These are my notes on hacking around the problem of getting the default locale in a Python application running on Android, including a simple example on the best method I've found so far.

Android's builtin version of libc, called bionic, doesn't have any concept of locale. Usually, when (cross-)compiling Python for Android, a patch for removing any parts of the Python source which mention LC_* is used before (cross-)compiling.

Another method for working around the locale problem on Android is in Google's alpha version of python3-for-android, which ships an alternate locale module that tries to import _locale from the standard library, and if that fails, it falls back to emulating a normal libc's C-Types for LC_* in a series of Python functions.

I don't want to fix a crappily designed operating system. I just want the Python apps that I write for normal systems that use a normal libc to just fucking work. Therefore, I'm resorting to cheap hacks.

One way to hack around this is to use pyjnius to wrap the java.util.Locale class in a Python class, and use the Python wrapper to ask AOS's JVM for the default locale. See locale-hack.py for a working version of this, which I ran on QPython (and here is QPython on the Google Play store) simply because it provides easy download of pyjnius.