I wrote PR 5305 for Paul Peny who uses cheap devices (less than 50$, maybe less 20$? I'm not sure) for development, but these devices use old Android versions.

It seems like some people are exchanging patches, in private or in public, for Android API 19. My intent is to make patches upstream, especially small patches which fix compilation of Python on Android API 19.

I'm not sure that we should support API 19.

Xavier de Gaye wants to focus on the future, support API 24 and newer:
https://github.com/xdegaye/cagibi/blob/master/doc/android_support.rst

His document gives many good reasons to not support API < 24.

My intent is not to "fully support" Python on Android API 19. Just to make sure that we can compile Python and that python3 -c pass doesn't crash :-) So only merge the most critical fixes for API 19.

IMHO merging further changes to fix other Python functions should be discussed on a case by base basis.