Tweet by dyates April 1, 2014 Google Play is an Aladdin’s cave for Android phones and tablets, but depending on your device, you may find some of its treasures hard to find. While the app store lists which versions of Android are supported by a particular app, having one of those versions is no guarantee it will install as Google Play may still decline to even show the app as an option. For the most part, that comes down to a developer decision on which devices are supported. There’s little you can do if your device doesn’t have the required hardware, but being told your device is not supported, when it otherwise might be, is annoying to say the least. Sometimes, there are good reasons why developers will limit installation apart from hardware compatibility — it may genuinely be that a device lacks some software feature or has proven to be an issue for some reason. Sometimes, it can be the app runs less than optimally on a device, so the developer decides to cut it from the list to save themselves the ‘one-star review’ headaches. However, the problem with this is that it can also cut out newer devices that may well run the app quite happily. We had an example of this in our recent story on installing Android 4.3 on your PC. After installing the OS successfully on a Compaq CQ42-136TU notebook, we couldn’t get Angry Birds to install — not because our notebook wasn’t capable of running the game but because it wasn’t on the app’s supported-device list. While it’s somewhat understandable, given Android wasn’t originally meant to run on a 1.9GHz Intel Celeron-CPU-based platform, it’s an example of what can be wrong with the current device support list system in Google Play. The system appears designed to take a very conservative stance to unknown devices, knocking them off if it doesn’t recognise them, rather than allowing users to install apps and find out for themselves whether they work or not. But given that apps live or die by their review ratings, it’s not surprising the store errs on this conservative side. Still, it may be designed to keep newbies out of trouble, but we think it’s too arbitrary for more experienced users. One common trick around this is to try and get Google Play to install the app by ‘pushing’ it onto the device through the Google Play web browser edition, but that only works if the device is on the ‘supported’ list. List your devices in Google Play by selecting the gear button, then ‘Settings’. However, there can be a way around it — and that’s to try and make your device look to Google Play like something else or, putting it another way, ‘faking’ another Android device. You can take the app route to achieve this such as the Market Helper app (not the one on Google Play), but in this class, we’ll look at a non-app option that may fix this issue. The key is a file in the /system folder of your device’s Android operating system called build.prop. It’s a text file Android uses to define many settings within the operating system, everything from video recording rates to faster booting. Think of it like the old config.sys file from DOS/Windows 95 days. Faking the device to a Galaxy S2 smartphone, the install lock is removed. But because it is so important to your Android device, it’s vital you don’t make wholesale changes unless you understand exactly what you’re doing — mucking up this file could see your device stuck in a boot loop, requiring an OS re-flash. All you need to edit the file are root access and a file manager with /system write access — you can try the free ES File Explorer or Root Browser or the payware Root Explorer apps from Google Play — you don’t need a PC or any other specialised app. Unfortunately, root access is required for any process that modifies the build.prop file, but using our manual method, you’re more in control of the process. Build.prop is a simple text file that sets up much of your Android device. Before you go making any changes to build.prop, you must make a full Nandroid backup or use ROM Manager to make a full backup of your device just in case everything goes pear-shaped. That means you must also know how to restore that backup if the process falls in a heap. In addition, we suggest you also make a local copy of build.prop for reference. If you stick to the changes we describe, you should be fine, but there are no guarantees — you do this at your own risk. And just in case you have to ask, this isn’t a process we recommend for Android newbies. Knowing how to do a Nandroid backup is vital. Google Play makes decisions about your device based on a number of build. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.build. The first five are simply make-and-model references, while the last one is an ID link or ‘fingerprint’ that details the legitimacy of your device. Now depending on what you read online, plenty of users are claiming it’s enough to simply change the ro.product pairs to fake another device. However, for every claim like this, you read four or five replies saying it doesn’t work. Our theory is that there’s likely to be more than one factor involved. In fact, the more you look into it, the more important the ro.build.fingerprint appears to be. Every Android device provides its own ro.build.fingerprint key link. We think the key to faking another device increasingly lies with ensuring you use a ro.build.fingerprint from the device you want to fake to. We’ve used this technique successfully to turn the popular $50 MK808 TV-stick mini PC into Samsung’s Galaxy S2 smartphone and begin downloading games such as FIFA 14 that wouldn’t download otherwise. However, it appears that newer versions of Android are having less success with this method — we’re not sure why at this stage, but we think it may just be a change in the requirements for successful faking. We don’t think Google has stopped it. The Market Helper app doesn’t edit build.prop but uses a similar technique and we know it still works — at least with Android 4.1 devices. Samsung’s Galaxy S2 is a popular choice to fake devices to. Mechanically changing the settings is simple — you open build.prop on your rooted device inside your file manager with any text editor, change the ro.product and ro.build.fingerprint pairs to the new device you want to fake and save the file. After that, you go into ‘Settings > Apps’, clear the data and cache options for Google Play Store app and immediately reboot. For example, part of our MK808 mini PC’s original build. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.build.fingerprint=rk30sdk/rk30sdk/rk30sdk:4.1.1/JRO03H/eng.lfwang.20121026. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.product. ro.build.fingerprint=samsung/GT-I9100/GT-I9100:4.0. However, in this instance, we also need to check other parts of build.prop to ensure they match the new settings. For example, the ro.build.tags setting here should be changed from test-keys to release-keys. Android authentication allows two sets of fingerprint keys, one for testing and another for general release and the ro.build.tags should match the fingerprint key type being used. In the example above, you can see the key type change at the end of the last line goes from test to release. One last thing, when entering the manufacturer, it’s important that you get case right — it’s samsung with a lowercase ‘s’, for example. To fake an LG phone, the manufacturer settings has to be LGE, all uppercase. Take your cues from build.prop files you find online from web sites like xda-developers.com. The MK808 runs a custom ‘rooted’ version of Android 4.1.2. It’s vital that you don’t change any settings that relate to the current version of Android being used by your device. Settings such as ro.build.version.sdk and ro.build.version.release must stay as they are. We changed them to see what happened — all you get is a permanent boot loop. That makes sense because you’re trying to tell the device it runs an Android version other than what it has — never a recipe for good times. Now one thing that caught us out early on was that when you go through changing the build.prop settings and reboot, you have to go into Google Play and download an app — and it seems to be any app — to get the Google Play servers to register your ‘new’ device. There’s also a time delay in this new re-registration — we’ve seen it take several hours before Google Play servers get updated. The MarketHelper app from our ‘Android 4.3 on PC’ story, on the other hand, bypasses build.prop and sends information changes straight to the Google Play servers using JSON (Javascript object notation). But the changes only last until you reboot your phone and your build.prop settings override. By editing build.prop, you’re making these changes permanent (until you change your build.prop file again). Root Browser is the ideal app to edit /system/build. prop files — and it’s free. But when it comes to faking a different Android device, the big question is which device should you choose? Obviously, you want to choose a device more popular than your own, but also something that is a reasonable match in terms of hardware to your own device (and one that’s popular with app developers). For that reason, we suggest starting with Samsung’s Galaxy S3 or S2 phone. The S3 arrived with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x) so if your device is stuck with an older ICS ROM, it should still work. If you’re running Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x), try the Samsung Galaxy S2. The real trick is to find the appropriate ro.build.fingerprint key for the device you choose. New keys are issued for each new ROM release — but you must use one for an Android release that is no newer than the one your device is running. For example, if your tablet is running Android 4.1.1, avoid choosing a ro.build.fingerprint key for an Android 4.1.2 release. Fingerprint key links aren’t too difficult to find with a bit of Google-sleuthing. We just searched for ‘GT-I9100 ro.build.fingerprint 4.1’ and found a number of them, most from forums and web sites like xda-developers.com. samsung/GT-I9100/GT-I9100:4.0. samsung/GT-I9100/GT-I9100:4.1. samsung/GT-I9100/GT-I9100:4.1. The one thing to remember is that faking a device through build.prop is as much a ‘black art’ as it is a science — and that’s because it still relies on your device having the hardware requirements to make an app work. If your device runs at least a recent ARM Cortex A9-series CPU with Mali-400 graphics, the chances of an app actually working improve significantly. By changing build.prop, you’re really just trying to get Google Play to recognise your device as something more common. But changing it doesn’t all of a sudden make your hardware compatible — that has to be a prerequisite if build.prop changes are to have any effect at all. For example, the MK808 mini PC runs Rockchip’s RK3066 dual-core Cortex A9 CPU with quad Mali-400 GPUs. Spoofing a Galaxy S2 here is just getting Google Play to recognise the device and allow app installation and it worked for FIFA 14. What certainly helps is that the core CPU/GPU hardware of both of these devices is very similar. Unfortunately, while device faking can be a help, it’s not a silver bullet. FIFA 14 installing on my MK808 mini PC, thanks to build.prop modding. Device faking is just one use for build.prop, which is one of the most important files in any Android device. With the file holding so many Android settings, there’s been considerable work done on finding generic system/performance tweaks through build.prop tweaking. In the next class, we’ll start looking at some of these tweaks, what they are and how they work. Modifying your Android device’s build.prop file demands you first perform a Nandroid backup, just in case everything turns pear-shaped. Unless you’re careful, changing the wrong settings could result in your device stuck in a soft-brick mode. While we have tested this story ourselves, this information comes with no warranty — you use it at your own risk. We won’t be answering emails requesting support. Take Our Poll (answers) Top ^Future is AOP & PPA Digital Publisher of the Year and BMA Media Company of the Year. This site is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. TechRadarT3Mac|LifeGizmodo UKMore... CVGPC GamerGamesRadarTotal FilmMore... MusicRadarGuitaristFutureMusicRhythmMore... Digital Camera WorldMollie MakesPhotography WeekThe Simple ThingsMore... 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