I am going to pick up the Shield when it releases in May. I have had the Shield Portable since its launch and absolutely love it, especially in console mode when hooked up to my TV, so the idea of a more powerful dedicated set top box is intriguing to me.
My Shield Portable supports a huge number of games natively with the controller. However, when I look through the "Android TV Play Store" online I see only a handful of these games are "Android TV compatible" and they don't show up in the Play Store browser on the Android TV device.
Is there a way to access the complete Play Store on the console? It seems silly to 100% exclude games and other apps even if they have controller support just because they weren't explicitly designed for Android TV. I would prefer to be able to install the apps "officially" through the store rather than sideload the APKs. (support devs, easy updates, etc).
TL;DR - Can you install any app with controller support even if it's not "Android TV certified" and how?
Thanks!!
You can side load anything you want: install to your phone or tablet, extract APK (there's an app to do this, no root needed), upload to your Google Drive or Dropbox, install ES File Explorer from the web to the Shield box, download APK, turn on side loading from global settings, install.