The past week has been quite busy for Nexus owners. Google started rolling out Android 4.4.1 last Thursday, and earlier this week we started seeing Android 4.4.2 roll out. Android 4.4.1 was primarily a camera update for the Nexus 5. While Android 4.4.2 was simply just a bug fix, since it was only 1.7MB in size. Before many people even got the Android 4.4.1 update, Android 4.4.2 was rolling out. It seems like Google’s rollouts are getting slower and slower. Which gives you more reason to root and sideload the update.
However, Android 4.4.1 never got the binaries and factory images posted online for us to go ahead and flash. But now we’ve got Android 4.4.2 binaries and factory images available. This is a good thing because it’ll help ROM developers bake better and more stable ROMs based on Android 4.4.2. It also means that you can simply flash the factory image if you’ve messed up your device and it’ll be like brand new again. It’s quite simple to flash them as well. The best way for beginners to do it is to use a toolkit, which you’ll find plenty of them over on XDA. You can also do it using the SDK and ADB, and it’s quite simple that way as well. However it does take a bit longer since you have to do each command instead of it doing it by itself like the toolkit would.
For those interested, we’ve got links below to both the factory images and binaries pages on Google’s Developers website. For most of you out there these binaries and factory images won’t mean much. But it’s a big deal, especially after all the drama surrounding the Nexus 7 2013’s factory images and binaries. Remember that these are only for the Nexus 4, 5, 7 2012 (WiFi and 3G), 7 2013 (WiFi and LTE), and the Nexus 10. No Galaxy Nexus or Nexus Q.
Download: Binaries for Nexus Devices | Factory Images for Nexus Devices