Note: This is a really old post transferred from Laurii for historical and consolidation purposes.

After reading a rottmann.net article, I got restless because my Galaxy Nexus phone was only 4.1.1. and wouldn't update. Initially, I thought it was like that because I got it in Luxembourg, but it was because of the model firmware. It was some model which gets updated by Samsung, not Google. One could say that it means more testing, tweaks and so on, but then, again, if I wanted a business phone I would get a BlackBerry :) ...err...no!

photo-galaxy-nexus-3

What's my phone's model

First, I went to go and find out which model is my phone, following a webtrickz.com tutorial. You can get the right model and stuff from XDA developers (aka the Mecca of phone tweaking). Finding out that my phone is not updated by google, to extremel.com to see how to do it.

Preparing the phone

First, the disclaimer: If you mess up your phone because you didn't do it quite right, don't blame me! Also, this process WILL erase all your phone data! You can go as far as you want with the preparation. From tutorials on XDA to getting Titanium backup. What you need to remember is that quite a bit of information is saved on your google account. Things like contacts, emails are backed up. All I ended up to back up were the photos and music and that's because I'm not too fond of having the photos uploaded on the cloud instantly (bandwidth, privacy...). Once that's done, you can start preparing the phone (for real!):

  • Get an Android SDK. You willneed it to mess around with fastboot and adb
  • Follow a tutorial to change your phone to a google-updated one (there are quite a lot out there)
  • Go to google's firmware page to get your favourite image, for your preferred phone flavour
  • Reboot the phone in maintenance mode

Note: If you use a mac, you need to do everything from the command line! :)

Update your phone

First, remember to unlock the bootloader and convert to your favourite variant of the firmware! Updating the phone is really easy. I followed this tutorial, step 3 (clean install) to be precise. One deviation from the tutorial is that I used fastboot to push binaries to the phone, not adb, because my adb woudn't do sideload. Once you reboot your phone, you have the new OS and you need to reinitialise it. If you want, you can reload the pictures and stuff. So far, all software I had is compatible. Facebook still takes ages to load anything :(

Notes

At the time of writing this article, following links were valid: