Spoofing an android device

Android stores its build related properties in a secret file inside it.That file is crucial and should not be tampered with without any knowledge about it.

So that's what i am gonna tell you.

A bird's eye view about that file

  • It has information about the heap size the phone has per app.
  • Phone's screen density(helps google play to pick the apps that can run on your phone).Ever wondered why temple run doesn't show up in the playstore for a phone with lower screen density.
  • Boot animation. The android animation that plays on when you boot your device.
  • Wifi scan interval .Increasing the interval can help save you battery.

A tool to help you

Download an application to help you edit this file.
Here's a link to the application

So now here's how you start to spoof your emulator into some real device model

Note: Tampering with these properties may cause some problems so better try it on emulator.

Here are few properties that will spoof it easily,don't forget to REBOOT after the changes are done.

description
fingerprint
build.type
build.tags
build.user
characteristics(tablet or phone)
board 
brand
device
manufacturer
model
name
host 

Result: Changing the above properties made me register my emulator as a samsung device on google.


Other configuration changes include 

lcd_Density - may allow google play to show some more apps to you
heap_size - may give more space to apps 
wpa_supplicant_scan_interval (in seconds) - saves battery when increased.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digging deep inside the build

Hi guys, This blog is gonna help you in building the android from source code.The Android is an open source and hence available freely over the internet on some privately owned repositories like git , google etc. The build we are gonna work on is the android build.Which can be downloaded via a repo tool.The repo tool is just a wrapper around the git commands.So basically it shortens it up.Use this tool to download the source as it like git provides flexible environment to work with. This tutorial demands the following pre-requisites Knowledge of android operating system. Repo/Git knowledge. Linux environment So Before starting up let me just place the environment of my pc on which i ran this test.The pc was an acer laptop aspire5733 with an ubuntu10.04   64bit os inside it with the following configuration RAM -1 gb SwapSpace - nill HDD-500 gb Now it's time to build the environment for the build to run.The build requires a set of pre-installed softwares inside...
Read more

Success with AndroVM

Image
  J ust as i was about to leave i was asked to complete my work.That work was actually this compilation , might sound similar to what my previous post was but trust me it wasn't. Okay bear with me,As i am gonna write this blog like a story and gonna tell the compilation process as i during it. In the beginning it was all so well and kept my fingers crossed while the source was downloading using the repo tool. NOTE: The step till lunch command you can follow as mentioned in my previous blog , but what changes is the way the "make" is done. The android build is accustomed so that it will result in few needed images (.img).But as i went through the blog of the guy who discussed about it said the AndroVM has a dependency ie:openGL which emulator won't be able to fulfill. So something struck me while i was building it that something other than emulator is required, then i came across the AndroVM player. So the question i asked was - Is it required in order to play...
Read more

Setting up continuous integration on linux

Image
Overview Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice in which isolated changes are immediately tested and reported on when they are added to a larger code base. The goal of CI is to provide rapid feedback so that if a defect is introduced into the code base, it can be identified and corrected as soon as possible. The Big picture   GIT It's a distributed version control system. Installing it is a cake walk. Installation  Installing for linux Configuration Run git --version to be sure in the cmd or terminal depending on your OS.   Gerrit It's your code review system that intercepts your code push to the repository. Installation  Download it here ... Configuration Gerrit requires a database in which all the reviews history will be stored for later retrieval.Let's setup mysql for the same (however you can use postgres as well). Create a gerrit user on your system sudo adduser gerrit2 sudo su gerr...
Read more