As is everyone’s ! This is a great think tank!!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Onn Boxes are Android TV, not stock Android, correct? I can’t seem to find what version they are using, but you wonder how they can get those boxes “Google Certified” and still sell them for $20.
Google certified is just an advertising avenue for both the seller & google…google floods the box with their stuff…& the seller uses the google name…win win for both. I guess when your the biggest retail store on the planet you can buy enough widgets at a ridiculously low price & get away with selling them for ohh…half the price of competitors.
ONN boxes are Android 10 with regular (so far) updates/patches…
But to be “Google Certified”, the box has to run Android TV, no?
Correct…Google makes everything Android so pretty much all boxes/sticks are using one form or another of their operating systems. Certification means they have “blessed” the box & therefore that vendor can use the TV version of the Android O/S…but…google also loads up those boxes like Amazon loads up their Fire TV boxes…so they’re getting more advertising bang for other google products from their operating system. What royalties are involved…I haven’t a clue…
One of the reasons I got the KM6 is it had Android TV & Troy gave it a good review…along with many others I read/watched…& he mentioned that the Android TV O/S was properly “tweaked” for viewing on TVs…I’ve since discovered that the larger/more popular box makers/sellers may not have the “official” Android TV…but they have the wherewithal & have engineered their operating systems for tv…but without all the google/amazon bloatware etc embedded within. Hope that makes sense…
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But since we have Troy on our side, we can counter with a Launcher and customize it back to our liking. 
Found this older article, but seems very relevant to what I have been asking on this thread.
5 yrs ago those that didn’t use the android tv o/s’s probably had some shaky visuals on their boxes/tv’s. I was probably using chromecast & youtubetv or hulu back then…maybe even still on cable. But in the yrs since the box makers have fine tuned & tweaked their generic android systems to where they are today…which for many of them, (like Ron says) you can’t tell the diff.
True. If you do your research most of these boxes dont have lots of differences just quality differences. You can get an amlogic 905x4 4/32 on stock box on amazon for sub $50. Thats not too bad for a little beef.
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That makes a lot of sense. Back years ago there were likely almost no good stock Android boxes that would work on a TV. Sounds like the higher end companies have figured out a way to make that work without having Android TV, but the part of the article about the cheap, knockoff boxes I think is still valid.
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