Not sure why you'd think they would be capable of doing anything but playing back content from online sources, maybe? Can you mention or pick an "Android TV box" for more info? If you mean - and I think you do - plugging in an RTL-based stick to use the box as the "computer" aspect then the only option at this time would be using
SDR Touch and the necessary RTL driver (also on the Google Play Market, free). SDR Touch is a commercial app with a limited trial (it limits the time you can use the spectrum display but it will continue to work even so) and runs about $9.99.
The reason that the "cheap USB TV tuners" happen to work is two-fold: first it's because of the particular system they were designed to receive (DVB-T) which is the old and now defunct European digital TV standard (in the US we use ATSC, a totally different and incompatible system alttogether). A few years ago the European standards changed and they dropped using DVB-T and shifted everything to a newer standard known as DVB-T2 which basically made DVB-T useless almost overnight.
That ended up leaving the incredible number of those "cheap USB TV tuners" that had been manufacturer almost totally worthless save for a small miracle that becomes the second reason which is some talented people looked at the way those sticks worked, realized if you modified the drivers in some respects, and actually did modify them in the way needed to turn those sticks into basically wideband radio receivers.
But in the long run I don't think the Android TV boxes
even have actual tuners in them but instead are designed to be connected to the Internet for all of their uses, I could be wrong there and I probably am but I've never really spent much time doing a lot of research into those devices. From what I've gathered they're not actually TV tuners, not even for digital terrestrial TV standards (ATSC in the US, DVB-T2 in Europe, other systems in other parts of the world and so on).
Not sure if this helps, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, guess I'll find out soon enough.
