After the announcement was made on Monday about Android 7.0 Nougat rolling out to Nexus devices (that includes the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player and the Pixel C), many were waiting on the factory images so they could update their device. Whether that was due to them being on a custom ROM, being rooted or another reason. The factory images will get you back to stock Android pretty quickly, even though it does wipe all of your data. Well the wait is over, Google has just posted the factory images for Android 7.0 Nougat on the Android Developers website.
If you’re unsure of what a factory image is, then you probably don’t need one. To put it simply, a factory image is an image that can be flashed onto your device and bring you back to factory settings. And in this case, it will update you to a fresh install of Android 7.0 Nougat, fresh out of the oven. If you need help flashing the factory image onto your device, we put together a tutorial already, which you can use to flash the factory image onto your device. Google has recently made it much easier to flash the full image, instead of needing to flash each part individually. Which is great for those that don’t have time to wait and flash each part of the factory image.
Android 7.0 Nougat is the latest version of Android, and it has been in developer preview since March. This means that many of the larger bugs should already be worked out. Although there are still some there in Nougat, which the Android team has already squashed in the next update to Nougat which will be coming rather soon. In Nougat, Google is launching seamless updates. This means that the updates will download and install in the background. Meaning that you won’t need to restart your smartphone every time you get an update to your Nexus device. This is going to make things much easier for those that don’t have time for their apps to optimize again after every update. Which can sometimes take quite a while.
Download: Factory ImagesDownload: OTA Images