On Monday, Google announced that Android 6.0.1 was officially rolling out this week. The update is somewhat small, with the highlighting feature being the addition of 200 new emojis. As with any update, there are plenty of other behind-the-scenes additions and improvements in this update to Android. It’s likely that the December security patch is also included in this update, although we haven’t yet confirmed that. It would make sense though, since Android 6.0.1 is rolling out at the start of December. Currently, the new version hasn’t been made available in AOSP, but that should happen before the end of the day. However, factory images are now available for Android 6.0.1.
Every Nexus device that got Android 6.0 Marshmallow now has Android 6.0.1 available as a factory image. That includes the Nexus 7 2013 (both WiFi and LTE), Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 (both WiFi and LTE), Nexus Player, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6P. So if you have any of those Nexus devices, you can go ahead and flash Android 6.0.1 onto your device now and check out the 200 new emojis added into Android with this update.
At this point, we haven’t had any reports of users getting the OTA onto their Nexus devices just yet. That should be starting at some point this afternoon, however, expect a slow staged rollout as is normal with these updates. The reason being is that while Google does a ton of internal testing and testing with their partners, it’s still possible that there are some bugs (some serious ones at that) in this update. So they push the update out to a small portion of users and make sure there are no major bugs before starting the rollout to the rest of the user-base. It’s a bit aggravating from a users standpoint, but it makes a ton of sense. As soon as the OTA’s start hitting devices, we’ll be sure to grab the link so that everyone can sideload it and get the update onto their device as soon as possible.
If you need help flashing the factory image onto your device, be sure to check out our guide here. It’ll help you in flashing (just change the filenames).