[Android TV General] 3lit3h4xx0r666:
Hello,

I'm not super versed in android development, but I have quite a bit of coding experience in various other areas. I've worked professionally as a web developer and I like to keep up on security topics and just generally expand my knowledge wherever possible. I feel like this question must have been asked already, but all my searches are turning up nothing. So. I'm gonna go ahead and risk forum faux pax in the interest of not succumbing to groupthink and ask it anyway.

Basically, I had the idea, as many people have of selling set top boxes with kodi, preconfigured so that people without the technical ability can easily make use of this technology. I've made a few prototypes, and as an engineer I find myself asking the question. "Shouldn't I be able to automate most of this... basically everything aside from purchasing and connecting the real-debrid or whichever CDN cached site is best suited in the end. I use real-debrid, just out of familiarity and I like the other features the subscription comes with. w/e, i'm straying from the point.

What I'm trying to figure out, as I've played with some of the chinese set top boxes that sell on amazon from 20-50$ and even cheaper in bulk from the various direct from china sites like aliexpress, and I found them to perform just as well for the purposes of streaming video as the much more expensive nvidia shield. I had in the past built a set top box on raspberry pi, and it never performed as well as the shield that I started with for personal use. However, the realization in my recent tinkering, that these chinese android boxes actually perform quite well, opens up a large profit margin that would not otherwise be possible preconfiguring nvidia shields. (i.e., I can purchase a device for 30$ that will do just as well and sell it for 100-150$, as opposed to buying the shield at that high of a price point). I've seen people selling these devices on craigslist, facebook marketplace, even in gas station parking lots. So I see the demand is high, and if I can supply them at the ~100$ price point. I imagine I could make a killing just locally. I understand the reasons why its not possiblle to sell these on a global market, so I won't even mention them.

But for my own personal business streamlining purposes, I was wondering if this is something I would want to make a custom rom to do or what. I'm not making any assumptions as I lack the knowledge, so I'm just trying to explain the problem I'm trying to solve. I'm not stuck on any particular set top box, as I know there are so many. I imagine many of them are exactly the same hardware with different branding, but what I hope to achieve is a way I can simply flash the firmware. Provide a set of apps for streaming, music and video, possibly retro games, all ready to go. Where the user only needs to create an account on real-debrid and follow a very simplified step by step instruction book, or maybe even produce a short howto video, and they are up and running.

I've even considered creating the CDN accounts preloaded with a year or 6 month subscription and sell the box with a little card containing the username and password. If I could automate everything but that final step, i feel like it would take most of the gruntwork out of this small enterprise. I noticed one thing about the roms on the devices i've tested so far that troubles me, and it's not a huge deal, but the app for the streaming service Tidal crashes, this was actually the discussion I was just having with my wife that got me thinking I should be maybe looking for a different rom, but I'm not sure what I would need to do to make it compatible with the specific device.

I understand that for every android device requires some modification to the rom source code in order to run. That has been a source of extreme frustration for me while trying to wrap my head around the world of custom roms. One would think by now, some sort of standardization would have been arrived at. Am I correct in my understanding that this is due to the system on chip nature of these devices, as opposed to the modular design of traditional x86 machines? I feel like I read something some time ago that google was pushing for equipment manufacturers to follow some standardization when exposing the functionality of their hardware so that a single binary base rom could be loaded onto any android system.

I understand there are quite a few questions off topic here, but I feel like if answered, I'm going to finally hit that eureka in the learning curve that will open up all sorts of other ideas for me, so I'm hoping someone can enlighten me or reccommend some reading based on the gaps in my understanding of these systems revealed by my question.

I've always found its best to ask questions, even when the end goal is not possible, I can get something out of the response. At the same time, I understand that the best way to ask a question online is to say what I'm trying to achive, not how I'm trying to achieve it, because usually I'm not getting anywhere because I'm taking the wrong approach.

So idk, maybe there's a simpler solution using a shell script and adb?

Maybe I'm opening an entirely different can of worms than I expected?

At any rate. I'm not ashamed to admit that I probably am not knowedgeable enough about this subject to even come up with a proper search query. So go easy on me, lol.

Does my question make sense?