This is new to me and I'm not sure what would cause it. I don't recognise the dependency, so either it's installed by chance (or I missed it) in our testing environment, or this message really arises from some other issue.

It's probably worth installing the lib if possible, in my distro it comes from the ncurses5-compat-libs package.

Yes I would definitely just install this system library. On Ubuntu it's via:

sudo apt install libtinfo5

And probably also:

sudo apt install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

The issue was also described in kivy/buildozer#841
Addressing #1750 should help with this kind of issues.

Thanks! I only had libncurses6 installed. It worked after i installed libncurses5.
Perhaps it could be added to the documentation: https://python-for-android.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart/#installing-dependencies only mentions libncurses without version.

I just hit this myself on a new install, it should definitely be added to the documentation. Perhaps we can also fix the requirement for it, I don't think it's actually necessary for Python to build, it probably thinks it needs the library due to some quirk of the android build environment.

you can also create a symlink so that 5 points to 6 (ln -s /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5) - probably there's a command somewhere that just needs to be more general.