Here’s a quick tutorial on how to spoof your android device.

Prerequisites to spoofing your device:

Install a file browser that can navigate to the system folders of the device, i.e. Root Browser. (Note: you’ll need root access to get to the necessary folder. You can view the following tutorial for an idea of what’s involved in rooting your device.)

Question: What do you mean by spoofing?

Answer: Spoofing means your device is tricking some app or service into thinking the device is a specific version, brand or model that it is not.

So for instance you’ve bought a Chinese OEM android device, say a CX-919 android TV stick, and you want an app or service to think that it is actually the latest Galaxy note.

Question: Why would you want to spoof your device?

Answer: Developers can limit what devices can play their apps on Google play. This can be because they want the app to run smoothly on the device so they limit the distribution to only devices which are powerful enough or have been tested. If your device is not a device that has been given permission to install the app you will get a message from google play stating this device is unsupported. This doesn’t necessarily mean your device can’t use the app, it’s just saying the man doesn’t want you to.

Other times developers, * cough Gameloft cough * actually put graphic restrictions within the game so only certain models from certain brands get access to the higher end graphics.

This is not due to the app testing your device and determining the performance capability of the device is too low and protecting from playing a game with awful lag because you set the graphics unrealistically high. It is because your device has a simple text file, called build.prop, which states what version, make and model your device is. Changing this file that identifies your device is usually sufficient to get past google play and internal app restrictions.

Steps to editing the build.prop file:

Step 1: Open root browser.

Step 2: Navigate to the system folder, enter it and scroll down to the build.prop file.

Step 3: Copy the file and paste to an external SD in case anything goes wrong (Or it’s not a bad idea to email yourself a copy if you do not have an external SD card mounted)

Step 4: Open the build.prop file with a text editor.

Once in build.prop you can edit the following things:

• Edit Android Version by locating ro.build.version.release= and changing the current Build Version.
• Edit your model # by locating ro.product.model= and changing your model #
• Edit your product brand by locating ro.product.brand= and changing the value to the desired brand
• Edit your manufacturer by locating ro.product.manufacturer= and changing the value to the desired manufacturer

Please Note that if you change the product brand, the name MUST be in ALL LOWERCASE LETTERS

In Most cases you can get away with just changing the model, brand and manufacturer to achieve your aims. With this being the case you might as well just change these identifiers to the latest Galaxy Note details. At the time of writing this is:

NOTE: GT-(i)9600 not L or 1

ro.product.model=GT-I9600

ro.product.brand=samsung

ro.product.manufacturer=samsung

Step 5: Once you are finished editing, Save the file

Step 6: Go into the Settings screen, select Applications, select Manage Applications, tap the All category, and select the Google Play app. Clear its cache and data.

Step 7: Reboot your device and once everything loads again, go to Settings> About Phone/Device and see the changes.

If this doesn’t get you past the unsupported restriction on google play it’s possible the game was developed specifically for Nvidia shield, just change the build.prop values accordingly.