At a recent press camp, Spencer was handed a Hammerhead Karoo to try out. The Hammerhead rep mentioned something called “sideloading” to get various apps onto the Andriod based Karoo and that piqued Spencer’s interest. He decided to see if the Karoo could run the classic video game Doom. For this month’s installment of Tinker Tantrums Spencer has a how-to guide to sideload apps onto a Karoo in Mac OS…

Using almost any kind of non-Apple device with Mac OS is always a pain. I pulled my hair out for years until Wahoo finally made it so you could connect via USB to their computers, and even that needed a program that is not free anymore. I found a few tutorials for sideloading to the Karoo, but many focused on how to do it via PC, with some conciliatory and incomplete Mac OS instructions. So I decided to share what I found out in my own Journey to play Doom on my hammerhead Karoo.

It has been brought to my attention that Hammerhead has streamlined the process for sideloading APK files from Github URLs in the companion app. Since I was not able to find a good source for sideloading outside the app we’re gonna stay the course on our deep dive and go over a backup process that should work for any APK file you can find.

1. The first thing you’ll need to have is a Hammerhead Karoo. So go ahead and power that on!

2. Go to settings, scroll to About, then when you see “Build Number”. You will then need to tap “Build Number” repeatedly. This will enable Developer Tools.

3. Go to “Developer Options” and scroll down until you see USB Debugging and make sure that option is on.

4. Go back to your computer and download the Android Developer tools.

5. Unzip the file then drag it to the main home folder on your Mac, this is usually named your username for your login. It should be able to exist anywhere on your hard drive but I was having a lot of issues with permissions in Terminal and found it easier to have it in the home folder.

6. Download a .apk file. For this, I used Doom.

7. Now, you need to open the application “Terminal.” Once you do that, drag and drop the “ADB” file from platform tools into the Terminal window. Then hit enter. A bunch of text will appear as the file is executed.

8. Plug your Karoo into a USB on your computer. When prompted to “Allow USB debugging” select “allow”.

9. In the “Platform Tools” folder, drag and drop the “ADB” file to your home folder. Once again, this seemed to ease the process, even if it was a bit cluttered.

10. Back in Terminal type “./adb devices”. Your Karoo serial number should show up, meaning the computer recognizes it.

11. Drag and drop your Doom APK file into the home folder as you did with the ADB file.

12. In Terminal type “./adb install “(make sure there is a space after install), then drag the doom apk file to the terminal node and hit enter.

13. You should get a success message, and you have successfully side-loaded an app onto your Karoo.

14. On your Karoo home screen you will see an extension option, click that. Play doom on a cycling computer!

Is Karoo the ideal platform for playing Doom? Not at all. I wanted to make this article to highlight the capability of sideloading on the Karoo and running Doom on a cycling computer is comical, at least to me.

What have you sideloaded onto your Karoo? What WOULD you sideload onto a Karoo? Let us know in the comments.