Well, issue 16353 has been entered upon attempting to fix issue 16255 (see msg173477).

So an alternative exists.  Issue 16353 could be closed as 'wont't fix'. The list of locations where '/bin/sh' is hard coded in the standard library in msg266084 shows that only the subprocess module and the test suite need to know the location of the system shell. So the subprocess module and issue 27027 could deduct the location of this shell via sysconfig.get_config_var('android_api').