It’s been a very Lollipop flavoured week with Android 5.0 arriving for most Nexus devices in both factory image form as well as Over The Air updates, except the Nexus 4. Today however, that changes and it’s now the Nexus 4’s turn. Even though the Nexus 4 is now two years old it is still a very capable device that stacks up well against some of it’s competitors. Now if you still own one of these you can enjoy the latest version of Lollipop on it.
To download the factory update you will need to the Google developers page hosting the updates and install then if you have the Android SDK installed, it’s merely a matter of running the Flash-All script that the image comes wit. It may seem daunting if you have never done it before but once you have gotten your head around the process it will seem perfectly simple and easy. It is well worth the reading and learning to enjoy the Lollipop goodness on your Nexus 4.
For those who run a custom ROM on their phone they have not been forgotten as the binaries required to build custom ROMs without issues have also been released by Google. It won’t be long at all before the custom ROM developers start cooking full custom ROMs based on Lollipop now.
Does anyone still have a Nexus 4 and have updated it already to Lollipop? How does it run? Can the two-year-old Nexus 4 handle the new version of Android like Google said it should be able to?
has anyone received the OTA yet?
Received the OTA update for my Nexus 4 overnight on AmaySim! Awesome, battery is noticeably better already, the new notifications are so much better & it’s running a lot cooler than it was on 4.4.4! Awesome!! Worth the wait!
Top job Google!
I have the Lollipop update on my N4, battery life is definitely improved, It took me a couple of flashes to get the wifi working properly (corrupted download of the factory image to start with) but it’s now all working properly. I have noticed that 5 Ghz wifi can sometimes initially not connect but it does eventually. It is definitely worth updating to Lollipop if you haven’t already!
Do you need to unlock the bootloader before running flash-all.bat?
I’m running stock *
Nevermind, found the answer 🙂
NRT (nexus root toolkit) does it all for you with a simple click if a button.
never, ever, will I recommend a root toolkit to anyone. They are a terrible way to do things. If something ever goes wrong you need to know how to fix things. Using a root toolkit will not teach you the survival skills necessary for life in the custom rom/nexus world. XDA developers generally hate toolkits because users use them and then when basic things go wrong the user complains left right and centre asking for help with things they should know- “what is adb?” “where is fastboot?”
I totally agree with this but ended up using it on my N7-2012 when I put 5.0 on. Was a rather quick/easy method but I did know what each step was doing.
Just flashed the factory image, restoring my apps at the moment!
and the thoughts are? (my wife hasn’t let me near her N4 yet to flash it)
Its friggin awesome .. I flashed lollipop on my N4 at 8:30 this morning and its been running smooth as! Instead of restoring from backup, I set it up as a new device not sure if thats made a difference in performance
a clean install always helps no matter what. Great to hear that it is going well. There is really no reason why it shouldn’t, the Nexus 4 hardware still holds it’s own. Thanks for the feedback