I recently discovered that it wasn’t all of Australia that is blocked from the Android Market. Of the major carriers it is just Optus. Sadly, that is who provides me with my SIM and occasionally network coverage.
I can only assume that it’s greed that has led Optus to prohibit the purchasing of App’s from the Market when users have an Optus SIM in their phone. There was a way around it using this app, which until recent versions of the Android OS worked just perfectly on rooted phones.
My solution at the moment is to swap SIM’s between my two phones (to a Telstra SIM) when I wish to purchase app’s, and then swap back. If you don’t have a Telstra SIM of your own, get a prepaid (it doesn’t need to have credit if you have a WiFi connection) or borrow a friends.
I have asked Google for comment on the issue with the Android Market and Optus, and will update the comments here when I get a response.
As an aside… for ADP1 users – to regain “root” access on your phone in 1.5 or 1.6 – simply:
Become root in adb
$ ./adb root
restarting adbd as root
Then connect to the shell on your handset:
$ ./adb shell
And execute the following commands:
# mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# cd /system/bin
# cat sh > su
# chmod 4755 su
# reboot
After your phone restarts you will have the “root” access you were used to previously.
The Android Market Paid Apps by Troy Kelly, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
