Android 7.0 Nougat was officially released earlier this week on a handful of Nexus devices, or at least those that have been launched in 2014 or later. Sadly but expectedly, with roughly 3 years of market time under their belt, the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 7 (2013) are officially out of the Android update game and Google no longer supports these devices with newer releases. The good news is that the developer community is already working on bringing Android 7 Nougat onto these devices, and it wasn’t long ago when the first unofficial Android 7.0 build for the Nexus 5 was released. And following the Nexus 5, today the Nexus 7 (2013) tablet joins the party with its first unofficial AOSP Nougat ROM.
As expected, the unofficial ROM reared its head on the XDA-Developers forum and is available for download by anyone willing to take it for a spin. However, the developer who goes by the forum name “zaclimon” warns that this isn’t “by any means” a daily driver, as it currently is in the early stages of development, and thus users can expect to see “a ton” of crashes. The main working elements within the unofficial ROM are the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity modules, but GApps (Google Apps and services which need to be flashed manually after applying a custom ROM) are listed as “Semi-Working” due to the fact that the Google Play Services are “always crashing due to some missing location permission”. What isn’t working at all are the Camera app and Audio, so in other words, the initial warning was fair. The ROM is not meant as a daily driver at this point in time, but for any Nexus 7 (2013) owner who may be interested in exploring the world of Android 7 Nougat, as yet this is the best place to start.
As a custom ROM built on the AOSP source code, the unofficial Android 7.0 Nougat port for the Nexus 7 (2013) should get better and improve with the passage of time, so even though it may not be the ROM you’re looking for at this point, it may eventually become good enough for daily use. For more details, installation instructions and resources, feel free to head down to the XDA-Developers Forum through the source link below.