After five months in beta and 5 Developer Previews, Android Nougat has been released with factory images available right now and OTAs beginning soon. Nougat represents version 7.0 of Android OS and is more of a refinement of what we find in Marshmallow than revolutionary. Still, having used Nougat on my Nexus 6P for the past several months, it has some very nice improvements and updates. The official announcement came on the Google for Work blog while the Official Android Blog page for the announcement went live a bit later.
Google has not released the Factory Images of Nougat at this point but I suspect those are just a few minutes or an hour away. Once they are available, for those of you who want it absolutely right now, you can manually flash your device. For those who want to wait, the OTAs should be beginning in short order, likely by the end of this week. For those of you in the Beta program, you should start seeing the OTA update to the final build today.
As a reminder, Android Nougat will be available on the following Nexus devices:
Android Nougat
- Nexus 6
- Nexus 5X
- Nexus 6P
- Nexus 9
- Nexus Player
- Pixel C
Other manufactures like HTC, Huawei and Samsung have already made commitments to getting Nougat out to their devices although the timelines are a bit vague save HTC. HTC has committed to having the Android Nougat update out for the HTC 10 and One M9 by the end of this year.
The question that is always on everyone’s mind: Will my device see the update? If your device is a 2015 mid-market to flagship device, probably. Most of the manufactures and carriers will want to get those devices updated and Google is putting a huge amount of pressure on them to get the update out there quickly. Time will tell exactly which devices will see the update.
