I've had the iPlayer app installed on my Shield for the last year until some time in the last few weeks when it just disappeared from my app shortcuts. I went into the full apps list and it was not there, so I looked on the Play Store and found that it was installed, but seemingly disabled as indicated by the "Enable" button. Clicking that and the app appears in the full apps list again, and I can add to shortcuts again. However this only seems to last for that usage session and next time Shield wakes up from sleep I have to do it all again. Any ideas what's going on please?
It's a region bug thing. The Shield keeps thinking you're outside the region for the app (UK) and disabling itself. I read you can try turning off 'Location status' in the settings, but I am not sure if that works 100% of the time.
What I do (i'm in Canada) is use a different non-System app copy of the BBC iPlayer app so that it never disables itself.
If you want a copy I have it uploaded to my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q86874h02on626i/BBC%20iPlayer%20%5B1.2.87%5D.apk?dl=1
It doesn't overwrite the BBC iPlayer system app. So if the original one starts working again you will see 2 copies appearing. It installs as "bbc.iplayer.modded.app".