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The funny thing about Android phones is that whether you have a 4.7 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display or a 800 x 480 pixel screen, icons, text, and other graphic elements tend to look about the same size. It’s tougher to spot the pixels on screens with higher resolutions.

But if you want to take advantage of all those extra pixels to fit more icons, text, or other graphics on your screen, there are ways to do that. If you root your phone there are a variety of tools that let you adjust the DPI settings for your entire device, or just for individual apps. But if you take the whole device approach, you may run into a problem: The Google Play Store may decide some apps aren’t compatible with your phone or tablet and stop showing them to you.

Xda-developers forum member hamsteyr came up with a solution: an app that lets you adjust your device’s pixel density, and which also modifies the Google Play Store app on your device so that it will show all the apps that are available for download.

The tool is called Google Play DPI Fix Tool, but it’s not just an app to fix the Play Store after you’ve already adjusted your DPI settings. It will adjust your DPI settings for you. It then grabs the Play Store and Google Service Framework from your device, modifies them, and puts the new files back on your device.

In order to use the tool, you’ll need a rooted Android phone or tablet, a Windows computer, and adb drivers for your device so that you can run the app from Windows while your Android device is plugged in.

Reading through the comments at the xda-developers forum, it sounds like the process doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, so proceed with caution. You may also be better off simply adjusting your DPI settings on a per-app basis, since that won’t affect the Play Store at all, but if you want to go all-out and enable a full tablet-like interface on your phone, Google Play DPI Fix Tool may help.

via reddit