Category: Android Nougat

Earlier this morning the official release of Android Nougat landed and now the Factory Images are available for those who want to manually update their Nexus devices.  The images are available for all of the supported Nexus devices as well as the Pixel C and for those of you who don’t want to wait for the OTA update to hit your device, you can manually update your device to the latest version of Android.

You can read my full review of Nougat to get all the details on what it brings to your devices.

For those of us that love Android, yesterday a pretty rock solid day.  Android Nougat was released and devices that were a part of the beta program have already started seeing the final NRD90M build hit their devices (you can read my review to get all the details on Nougat).  One tidbit of news in all of the hubbub of the release was the announcement of regular maintenance releases for Nougat.  It was easy to miss as, as far as I am aware, it was only posted in the Android Developer Blog announcing the release.  That blog, unless you are developer, isn’t on everyone’s reading list understandably.  In that post from Dave Burke, he pointed out a small but important piece of information about Nougat.

We’re moving Nougat into a new regular maintenance schedule over the coming quarters. In fact, we’ve already started work on the first Nougat maintenance release, that will bring continued refinements and polish, and we’re planning to bring that to you this fall as a developer preview. Stay tuned!

This new maintenance schedule is independent of the monthly security updates.  This new maintenance schedule is all about bringing features, refinements and fixes to the platform.  It is also, in my opinion, a shot across the bow of manufactures who drag their feet in getting the .0 releases out.  Android is going to march forward and Google, more or less, is telling OEMs to get with the program.

Android Nougat represents the 7th major version of Android, Google’s mobile Operating System. While terms like evolution are appropriate for this release, I think a different word is more appropriate.

Refinement.

While there are some new features that make Nougat a worthy update, by-and-large it is safe to say that this version of Android is refining many of the features that made their appearance in Marshmallow. That, in my opinion, is a very good thing.  Improvements in this release of Android come in various forms from UI updates to under-the-hood changes that make it perhaps the most refined version of the Operating System to date.  My point is, if you are looking for massive changes between Marshmallow and Nougat, you may be disappointed.  There are changes, to be sure, but not polar-shifting, orbit altering changes.  More subtle changes… or refinements.

Here is my review.

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.

There are a lot of indicators to suggest that we could well see Android Nougat, the next major build of Android, be released next Monday.  Canadian carrier Telus indicated in a forum post that the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X on their networks will receive the update on August 22nd.  If that is indeed the case, it means that Google themselves will be dropping the update out to those devices (as well as the Nexus 6) that day as the carriers and manufactures cannot release it prior to Google themselves.

Adding further evidence to a Monday release is LG.  The Android phone manufacture will be starting a limited preview program in Korea on the LG G5.  Again, like Telus, LG can’t release a preview program prior to Google releasing the bits.  If they are saying that the preview program is starting on Monday, that means Nougat will have to be available on Monday if not sooner.

The utilitarian app Google Calculator has been updated for Android and while it is certainly a small update, it does have one nice new creature comfort feature and an underlying more important one.  First, the update is build is version 7.0.1 for those keeping score at home and it is rolling out in the Google Play Store now.  You should see the OTA in a day or two.  As for the creature comfort feature, the app now groups large numbers.  In other words, here in the US, you will see a comma between each group of numbers such as 123,456,789.  Previously you would just see 123456789.  Again, not a big deal but it does make it easier if you are using the app for computing large numbers.