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One of the key benefits of a Nexus device is that they are normally the first to receive new operating system versions. There is a catch though – as with Play store downloads, Google employ a staged rollout for the updates, meaning that if you are unfortunate enough to be in a late batch, you could end up getting the update weeks later than other Nexus users. Frustrating to say the least! Don’t worry though; there is invariably a way to update your device manually, either by manually using ADB and the OTA update file itself or by using the latest factory images. This approach normally wipes the device, but you can prevent this happening by slightly tweaking the flash process.

Nexus factory images are normally updated around the same time as OTA updates first become available. They are available to download from https://developers.google.com/nexus take care to download the correct image, particularly where Wi-Fi and mobile variants of a device are both available.

The factory images are in a tar.gz format and these will contain the images themselves (in a ZIP format) as well as the flashing scripts. As you will be fl ashing manually without using the scripts, you will need to extract the ZIP file as well as the main archive in order to fully access the bare images for your Nexus.

Now that you have your device in bootloader mode, you should flash each partition in turn as detailed in the flashall script. The only step you want to skip here is the ‘fastboot format userdata’ step because this is the part that will end up wiping your device! Reboot with ‘fastboot reboot’ when you are done.