Installing Android Market and apps on your NOOK Color using a Mac

Installing the Android Market

and Google apps onto our new Honeycomb tablet can be a complicated process. Thanks to AddictiveTips.com for their excellent guides, which helped in the making of this tutorial.

To begin, we'll need to do a few things to get the Android Market and Google apps up and running. First off, you need to have the

Android Software Developer Kit

. You can get it at bscotch.tv/SDK. We recommend saving this folder in your home folder for easy access. You can move or delete it later.

Unzip the package and go into the Tools folder. Here, launch the Android item. Terminal will pop up and a few seconds later you'll get the Android SDK GUI. Click on Installed Packages and choose Update All. It will take about a minute to pull all the data in. Next, deselect every package except Android SDK Platform-tools and click the Install button. You may be asked to restart ADB. Choose Yes.

Now, go back into your Android SDK folder. You should see a new folder called platform-tools. You'll now need to download the Android Market, which is a file called Vending.apk. You can find this file at bscotch.tv/Vending. Save this file to the platform-tools folder. Next you'll also want to get GoogleServicesFramework.apk which you can find at bscotch.tv/GoogleServices.

Now, open up a Terminal window. Navigate to the platform-tools folder of the Android SDK by using "cd" which stands for change directory. In our case, we've dropped the folder in the home user directory to keep things simple. All we need to do is type "ls" to see a list of files and folders.

Type "ls" and look through the file list for this file: android-sdk-mac_x86

Type "cd android-sdk-mac_x86" to enter that folder. Now type "cd platform-tools" to enter the next folder. Now, ensure your NOOK Color with the Honeycomb SD card is connected to your computer and powered up. If you know what a path is and how to add a folder to it, go ahead and add platform-tools. If not, we'll be prefacing all commands with ./

Now, type:

./adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 /system
./adb push Vending.apk system/app/Vending.apk
./adb push GoogleServicesFramework.apk system/app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk
./adb shell
cd system/app
chmod 6755 Vending.apk
chmod 6755 GoogleServicesFramework.apk
exit
./adb reboot

Your NOOK Color will reboot. Give it about 40 seconds to do so. Afterwards you can unlock it. Go to Apps and you'll now have

access to the Android Market

and you've also got Maps and Gmail, among a few other Google apps.