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Comment by seam_carver | Hacker News Reader

Be careful of Android boxes for the TV that are only running plain Android or AOSP. Get one with AndroidTV or GoogleTV, blessed by Google. I personaly use an Onn Box 4K from Walmart.

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Oh boy, let me tell you about my LG Google TV (55GA7900). It was awesome when it was brand new, I really enjoyed being able to install various apps (this is pre-roku days where it wasn't common place). After a couple years, they moved on to Android TV - but everything still worked and they still pushed out some occasional updates. Well, a few more years went by and it became EOL. LG pushed out one final update which fixed a few things and disabled the update feature altogether (Android 4.2.2). Well guess what? The update was junk and made it where you could not scan for over-the-air channels. The scanner would just crash and no channels would be found. There was no way to go directly to a channel or manual add channels - scan only. So here I was with a smart tv that couldn't even watch TV over the air. I'm sure LG was also to blame, not just Google, but I sure wouldn't buy or recommend a google TV. Looks like they are now switching back to Google TV and the poor folks who were duped into getting an Android TV will be the next to experience abandonment.

LG WebOS is just as bad. It used to load in a second but after a few update, booting up the TV takes 10 to 30 seconds.

They changed where it boots to. You don't have any image or app menu by default anymore. They changed Terms and Conditions so many times, reenabling tracking defaults as they see fit.

Seeing how they support their own OS, I'm not surprised they broke support on Android-TV.

My hunch is that most of these "Android TVs" are cheap jailbroken devices loaded with Kodi and links to servers full of pirated content. These things have been around a long time.

Blessed by Google but full of ads :(

How long are there updates for old TV boxes no matter if AOSP, Android TV or Google TV?

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