When Raccoon can’t find a specific app on Play…

Just had a rather long email exchange concerning a particularly elusive app and it ended with a facepalm moment (as in: why didn’t I think of that?).

Ok, lets just go over the basics real quick: Raccoon must mimic an Android device in order to get service from Play. Play will then only fork over those apps, deemed to be compatible with the emulated device. If you are using a GSF ID scraped of an existing device, everything is peachy. However, the whole point of Raccoon is kinda to not have to tie your real phone into the Google cloud.

On its own, Raccoon can register a GSF ID for a vanilla phone that is compatible with most apps. However, in some special cases, that won’t do and this is where DummyDroid comes into play (no pun intended). Dummydroid allows you to fake any hardware profile you like – but you need to know what you are doing (that’s the reason why this functionality is not build into Raccoon).

Here’s the catch: most people think that the build.prop file alone already defines a complete device (compatibility) profile. That is not the case! For some strange reason, the file does not include the screensize/density (even though other hardware aspects like mainboard are listed). It also does not contain installed software libraries and system features.

So, if you scrape a build.prop off your device, also make sure to get libraries features. ADB is your friend:

Posted in Android, Tinkering, Tips and Tricks