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I have an unrooted Archos 70IT with the market add-on app and there's a number of apps that I can find in the Market on my Droid but not on my Archos. They are likely "protected apps" which can only be installed on devices approved by the apps dev.

To get around this I just download them to my Droid, save to Dropbox then install on my Archos. These apps work just fine, so rather than be "protected" from "incompatible" apps and having to do backflips to get the apps I want, I'd like to trick the Market into thinking I'm on a Droid or some other ubiquitous Android device.

Is there anyway of doing this a) at all, and b) on an unrooted device? If so, how?

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  • Is a list of these "incompatible" apps (apps that function well, but aren't available) for Archos Gen8 devices available anywhere?
    – Zoot
    Jan 27, 2011 at 17:00
  • Not that I'm aware of, considering the over 100,000 apps in the market this would be a little unwieldy. The easy way to find them is to search them on your Gen8 device. If they don't show up, then they are "protected". I haven't encountered any app that my A70IT can't actually run except for the Flash app I took off my Droid (this isn't surprising because Flash is very specific to the hardware's architecture. There is a Flash app that reportedly works that you can find in the xda forums).
    – Matt
    Jan 27, 2011 at 17:47

1 Answer 1

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Yes, it can be done but it requires root. You edit the device fingerprint in the build.prop file. Here are details: http://androidforums.com/samsung-galaxy-spica/98024-protected-app-market-fix-tutorial-build-prop.html

Edit: For a more complete answer, see How can I modify the phone model in build.prop to get unsupported apps?

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