Another Android 7.0 Update??

Buddy1969

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Hi guys n' gals

I am owner of an unrooted, unlocked Nexus 6P and very happy with it. A few days ago I got my Nougat OTA. Everything installed ok. The October security update was already installed under Marshmallow, so I thought, I was on track with all the updates

1st strange thing:
Yesterday I got another "Android 7.0 update" via OTA. It definitely said "Android 7.0 update". It did not say "Security update" or anything alike the other updates I received before. Size was around 50 MB, so it was not that big.

2nd strange thing:
I always thought, under Nougat the updates download and install in background and are activated with the next reboot or so. This one installed properly, with status bar, before rebooting the device

3rd strange thing:
While installing the update, the device did not show that little droid with that gadget rotating in it's belly. No, the nice little guy was replaced with an eerie, psychedelic, hippie like glowing light circle that changed colours ...

Any infos on this strange update? Was this a hotfix of some kind?
Settings still state 7.0, angler-03.72, Build NBD90X
So it seems, nothing changed here...
 

Buddy1969

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Depends on what you define as "stable". I haven't used a completely stable OS for ... well ... for ages. But I'm not in the beta program, if you tried to point that out. So as far as OTAs go I think that I got the production version of Android already in my first Nougat upgrade.
 

PaulQ

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I got the 50mb update today too. It appears to have added the October 5th security update. I checked before the update and I had the September update. I also noticed that the install procedure was new. It spent the most time on the colored dots animation. I think this is how updates are installed in Nougat.

I am under the impression that this "background installation" system will not arrive until v7.1 - we are on 7.0
 

Dconn1975

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I just purchased my phone today from Best buy. I got that same update to 7.0. To be honest, I think I like marshmallow better. Maybe 7.1 will be different, but if not I'd rather have my marshmallow back please.
 

zorak950

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You will never get background updates on the 6P. That feature relies on a storage partition system that phones which originally shipped with previous versions of Android don't have, and changing it is a high-risk procedure which is unlikely to be attempted via an official update. Only hardware developed after 7.0 or custom firmware will support it.
 

TGIS

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Hi guys n' gals

I am owner of an unrooted, unlocked Nexus 6P and very happy with it. A few days ago I got my Nougat OTA. Everything installed ok. The October security update was already installed under Marshmallow, so I thought, I was on track with all the updates

1st strange thing:
Yesterday I got another "Android 7.0 update" via OTA. It definitely said "Android 7.0 update". It did not say "Security update" or anything alike the other updates I received before. Size was around 50 MB, so it was not that big.

2nd strange thing:
I always thought, under Nougat the updates download and install in background and are activated with the next reboot or so. This one installed properly, with status bar, before rebooting the device

3rd strange thing:
While installing the update, the device did not show that little droid with that gadget rotating in it's belly. No, the nice little guy was replaced with an eerie, psychedelic, hippie like glowing light circle that changed colours ...

Any infos on this strange update? Was this a hotfix of some kind?
Settings still state 7.0, angler-03.72, Build NBD90X
So it seems, nothing changed here...
I know the animation is the new update animation
 

swebb

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Dec 17, 2009
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You will never get background updates on the 6P. That feature relies on a storage partition system that phones which originally shipped with previous versions of Android don't have, and changing it is a high-risk procedure which is unlikely to be attempted via an official update. Only hardware developed after 7.0 or custom firmware will support it.

I was not aware of this. I don't think I missed this when reading about the seamless update coming with Nougat, but it is possible.

Or maybe Google wasn't quite upfront about this?
 

bjrosen

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Background installation is a Pixel only feature, the 6P will continue to get monthly OTA updates that you have to explicitly install.
 

neo905

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You will never get background updates on the 6P. That feature relies on a storage partition system that phones which originally shipped with previous versions of Android don't have, and changing it is a high-risk procedure which is unlikely to be attempted via an official update. Only hardware developed after 7.0 or custom firmware will support it.

Except under Developer options you can check "Automatic system updates". I never tried it though.
 

swebb

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Except under Developer options you can check "Automatic system updates". I never tried it though.
Automatic System Updates is turned on for me and I still got this update the old way. Only difference was new animations and there wasn't a prolonged time where it updated each installed app individually.
 

LeoRex

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Some moving parts here...

First... Seamless upgrades... This feature requires a phone to have a new partition mapping, essentially the phone needs two system partitions, A and B... They start on the same version. When an update drops, while you are running on A, it upgrades B... when its done, you reboot the phone to B and now A sits there, waiting for the next update. The first phones to support this system wil be the Pixel phones... and, interestingly enough, that might also mean the end of the "32G phone that is really only 25G" as some people reporting that the 32G Pixel has 29.7G of usable storage out of the box....if you format a 32G bit of media, you pretty much get 29.7G so that means the system partitions might be on a separate NAND chip. So the Pixels might have a secondary 16G or so storage chip used for system stuff...

that's cool....

BUT... in 7.0, they also updated the runtime so that when you upgrade, you won't get that "Android is upgrading" message again. It also means that installations are quicker, so if you are one to do a factory reset from time to time, or load custom roms, etc... and use the Google Play Store app restore, that will take a lot less time to complete.

---

That being said... the 6P will never support seamless system upgrades. First, reformatting the partitions is risky business and if things go south, the phone is junk and you can howl at the ADB moon all you want and the thing will be a doorstop. The second reason is like I mentioned above, seamless system updates need to have twice the amount of reserved storage to work. So your user-accessible storage would drop from 24 or so G on the 32G model to probably around 18G. The 16G 5X wouldn't have a prayer. You won't see it on the S7, the V20, any of those Motos that just came out... none of them. If the phone doesn't come from the factory from day 1 supporting seamless upgrades, the chances of it getting it in a future update are pretty much zero.
 

GSDer

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That's all true - but I'd take a chance on flashing firmware that rewrote the whole shebang if it was available.
 

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