this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Aren't the boxes running "Android TV", the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?
They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for "Android TV" to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.
That's the problem, they're not running Android TV at all. Just regular phone Android with some third party launcher.
Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual "Android TV" for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn't they use that?
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why, but for whatever reason these boxes are always running a pretty old version of regular Android. (Edit: in fact googling a couple of the devices in the article seems to confirm that)
Maybe there are more protections preventing this kind of malware on newer versions? Maybe someone just made the images a long time ago and people are just reusing them