Part 2 - How to get the most out of the Hama Internet TV Box - Adding Google Play

So, now that we're rooted it's time for some more action. While the box comes with AndroidPIT and SlideME markets most of the apps still are only available on Google Play so if we could get Google Play up and running we would have access to a lot more apps.

1. First we need a copy of Vending.apk. I pulled the current version from my rooted Android 2.3 phone using "adb pull /data/app/com.android.vending-1.apk" but for those who do not want to do it the hard way you can download it here. Save it to your SD-card.
2. Download Term.apk and save it to your SD-card.
3. Insert the SD-card into your Box and install Term.apk.
4. Start Terminal Emulator (that you just installed) and make yourself root by issuing the "su" command. A dialog will show the first time asking you to Allow or Deny the Terminal Emulator requesting super user access (root). Push "Allow".
5. Now we need to remount /system/app to read-write so we check which partition is mounted as /system/app by using the "mount" command without any parameters.
6. In my case (and most likely your case) /dev/block/mmcblk0p3 is what it will list as being mounted to /system/app.
7. To remount /system/app as read-write (default is read-only) you use this command: "mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mmcblk0p3 /system/app" (change mmcblk0p3 if your firmware is using something else).
8. Now we can write to /system/app so we want to copy Vending.apk into it. But since we have no "cp" command we will have to use "cat". So we use this command: "cat /sdcard/Vending.apk > /system/app/Vending.apk". (the cat command prints the contents of a file but we redirect the output to a file)
9. Voila! Fire up Google Play and login.

(Don't worry about remounting /system/app to read-only. Just restart the box and it will be mounted as read-only during boot up.)


You will notice that a lot of apps will not be available or listed as "incompatible". We're going to change some of that in the upcoming articles. However, first we should add busybox to get a lot of usable commands like the "cp" command (cp is the copy command in Linux/Unix). Part 3 will cover installing busybox.

Disclaimer: This operation will most likely void your warranty and is done completely at your own risk.