Installing Google Play Store on the Asus Tinker Board

Google Play Store

Asus has released a new build of Android for the Asus Tinker Board last week. It’s a fairly minor upgrade. It’s still based on Android 6.0.1 with kernel 3.10.0 but sees a number of fixes. However, there is no Google Play Store. This makes installing and upgrading apps tiresome. Fortunately, there’s a solution. This walk-through explains how to install the Play Store on the Tinker Board.

• The first step is to install the latest Android system image to a microSD card.
• Next, determine the local IP address of your Tinker Board. Go to the Application folder, select Settings, then select About tablet (in the System section), and choose Status. As you can see from the graphic below, the IP address on my local network is 192.168.1.106. Your IP address is likely to be different. Use your local IP address instead of 192.168.1.106.

• Next, we’ll use the adb command line tool as it enables us to communicate with an Android device. adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Check you have adb installed on your Linux box. If not, install it via your distribution’s package manager, or from the command-line (e.g. for Debian based distributions):
  sudo apt install adb
• Download Google Play Services, Google Services Framework, and Google Play Store apks from apkmirror.com to a Linux box. The Tinker Board uses the armeabi-v7a and armeabi instruction sets. Download links: Google Play services, Google Services Framework, Google Play Store.
• Rename the downloaded files (using mv) to playservices.apk, gsf.apk and playstore.apk respectively.
• Copy the files to the Tinker Board. At a Linux shell, type the following commands replacing 192.168.1.106 with your local IP address for the Tinker Board:
  adb connect 192.168.1.106
adb root
adb connect 192.168.1.106
adb shell
mount -o remount,rw /system
exit
adb push playservices.apk /system/priv-app/
adb push gsf.apk /system/priv-app/
adb push playstore.apk /system/priv-app/
• From the Application folder, go to Settings, Apps, and give all permissions to both the Google Play services app and the Google Play Store app. For brevity, I show a screenshot for Google Play Store only.
• Reboot the Tinker Board.
• On my system, Google Play Services kept shutting down. Fortunately, an update of Google Play services fixes the problem. So at a Linux shell, type the following:
  adb connect 192.168.1.106
adb root
adb install -r playservices.apk
• If everything is ok, you’ll now have the Google Play Store.

Here’s Google Play Store in action.