Best Android TV box: Our pick of the top Android TV devices | Expert Reviews UK

Many Android TV boxes market themselves as Kodi devices on which you can download the Kodi open-source software and gain access to music and audio streaming across an enormous range of services. In the wilder parts of eBay, you might stumble across devices calling themselves Android TV boxes that claim to come unlocked or preloaded with what would normally be subscription channels or free content. Don’t buy them as they may be illegal.

However, there are dozens of perfectly legal devices out there and there’s nothing illegal about the Kodi platform itself, provided you don’t use it with piracy-enabling add-ons. If you’re concerned about your ISP being able to see your Kodi activity, we highly recommend using one of our favourite VPN services when using something like an Amazon Fire TV Stick. A good VPN will hide your traffic from your ISP and let you virtually change your location so your Kodi add-ons will work from anywhere.

What should you look for in an Android TV box?

Frankly, it’s a chaotic market, with the specs, features and boxes themselves changing regularly. If you’re buying one of the myriad Chinese-made boxes, we would advise looking for one with a quad or eight-core processor, 2GB to 4GB of RAM and 16GB to 32GB or more of storage – often confusingly labelled “ROM”.

Dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi plus 4K support are also useful extras, but don’t get too excited by claims of 6K or 8K support: until more TVs and streaming services support higher-than-4K resolutions, they’re virtually meaningless and it’s doubtful that the boxes have the horsepower to process all those pixels.

The other thing to watch out for is software. Only a handful of Android TV boxes actually run what Google calls Android TV – most simply run a version of Android with the manufacturer’s own TV-focused interface. The latter may or may not have access to the Google Play store and may run preinstalled versions of Kodi and popular video-streaming apps.

Generally speaking, boxes running genuine Google Android TV are easier to use and more reliable. However, even on these, you might have problems running Netflix or Amazon Prime without employing esoteric workarounds. If you don’t like getting your hands dirty with sideloaded apps or reconfiguration, we suggest sticking with an Amazon Fire TV or Nvidia Shield TV. If you’re happy to tinker, though, you will find some bargains – and fun – to be had.

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