Ok finally there IS a spring in the micro SD slot, for some reason it did not work the first time, I had to push teh micro SD really deep before it finally worked. Working fine now.
I tried to install the Play Store from by sideloading the latest official apk grabbed from XDA, but the store would not launch. The chinese rom is totally void of any Google package, which means the only way to get the Play Store and the mainstream Google apps to run is to install a gapps package. Problem: we don't have a custom recovery to flash the said gapps zip. Solution: based on some reading on the web and experimentation, it is relatively easy to manually install the gapps package. Mind that you must not be repelled by technical gibberish to attempt this procedure
1) Download the KitKat Gapps zip from Goo.im:
https://goo.im/gapps/gapps-kk-20140105-signed.zip2) Copy it to your external SD card
3) Use ES File Explorer to unzip the Gapps package
4) Copy the contents of the
system folder of the extracted package to
/system, do not overwrite existing files! You must first activate root explorer in ES and mount
/system read write.
We're not done yet. The copy messes up the file permissions, we'll have to restore them to rw-r--r-- for every copied file. You could do it manually but that's a lot of handiwork and very error prone. Instead we'll connect to the iPlay with an abd shell root session and script this. Here's how (assuming a Windows system, translating to Linux is easy peasy) :
1) Locate
adb.exe, the Android Debug Bridge executable, on your computer. If you don't have ADB installed, grab a package from Google Developer website
2) Connect the iPlay to your PC, and open a command prompt
3) Navigate to the folder where
adb.exe is located
4) Type
adb devices to check if your iPlay is detected. If ot you must first install the USB driver (the NVidia Shield Portable USB driver will work just fine).
5) Now let the fun begin. Execute the following commands in order:
adb shell
su (check your screen for a confirmation dialog, allow root access)
mount -o remount,rw /system
cd /system
cd /app
chmod 0644 *.apk
cd ../priv-app
chmod 0644 *.apk
cd ../etc/permissions
chmod 0644 *.xml
cd ../../framework
chmod 0644 *.jar
cd ../lib
chmod 0644 *.so
cd ../usr/srec/en-US
chmod 0644 *exit
exit
Then reboot your iPlay, you're done. You'll have the Play Store and the core Google apps installed. Time to log in to your account and start upgrading these, and downloading stuff!
For those who feel scared by all that tech talk, I'll try to find some time to create a fully automated script and a step-by-step tutorial. Just please be patient
