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Just a quick one here, I've recently installed gingerbread to my HD2 using cyanogenmod 7, previous to this I was running froyo through a different mod. My problem is this, many of the market apps that ran fine on my phone before are now listed as incompatible and Google play refuses to let me download them. I know that they are compatible, because like I said, I ran them perfectly well on my froyo mod. Is there a way around this problem?

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It's really hard to say without knowing specifically what previous ROM you were using, but there are two possibilities I can think of:

  1. The apps in question were updated to require some new feature that your device doesn't have.
  2. (Probably more likely) Your previous ROM had different information in the build.prop file than your current one does. This can include specific hardware like GPS, NFC, accelerometer and such or things like screen density.

The /system/build.prop file contains a lot of information about the hardware of your device (among other things), and it's what the Play Store will use to determine if your device supports the hardware requirements of a given app. It is fairly common for ROMs to use build.prop entries to masquerade as other devices or pretend to support nonexistent hardware for the sake of app compatibility. I would suggest trying to find a copy of your old ROM in zip format then extracting the build.prop from your old ROM and comparing it to your current one. If they are different then you can consider editing your current build.prop to include any missing entries from the old one (there are apps to help you do this). This is also covered in some detail in Is there a way to trick the Android Market into thinking I'm using a different device do I can download protected apps?

For screen/LCD density specifically there are a handful of apps that will help you modify it. Based on Chahk's comment, values of 160 and 240 may be good to try if it is set to something different than that.

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The most likely cause is that his LCD density is set either too high or too low. There are several ways to change it (manually via build.prop file or with an app like LCD changer.) – Chahk Apr 9 '12 at 10:47
@Chahk: I kind of mentally lumped that into "hardware" since it's based on screen size and resolution, but yes, that's certainly a possibility. – eldarerathis♦ Apr 9 '12 at 12:55
I've recently had this exact same problem while helping a friend root his HD2 and install CM7 on it. Once we changed LCD density to something more mainstream, the Play Store started behaving itself. – Chahk Apr 9 '12 at 12:58
@Chahk: Do you remember what density value you ended up using? That could be useful to add, but I haven't a clue what it would be myself. – eldarerathis♦ Apr 9 '12 at 13:23
We had to set it to "160" for Play Store to start allowing apps to be installed/updated. I've also heard that "240" should work also, but we haven't tested that. – Chahk Apr 9 '12 at 13:29

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