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Google’s Nexus 5 at 10: A glimpse into the future
The Nexus 5 was released right when Google started taking software and hardware seriously
It’s hard to believe, but the Nexus 5 is 10 years old this week. It was released on October 31, 2013, launching just about a month after the original Moto X. Google was in a weird position at the time, with the company having just bought Motorola and its own lineup of phones, all while keeping the Nexus series very much alive and well. In a sense, the Nexus 5 represented a real crossroads for Google, with the company starting to take software design and hardware ownership seriously. That pressure made the Nexus 5 one of the best phones of its time, even in a vastly different landscape from today’s best flagship phones.
A group of security researchers has discovered an exploit that lets Bluetooth and USB accessories wreak all sorts of havoc on multiple Android smartphones. In both cases, the door of entry was the cellphone modem, or baseband, which is found inside all smartphones.
LineageOS is one of the most popular custom ROMs available, with somewhere around two million active installations. It typically takes a while for the project to update to newer versions of Android, since development is largely done by maintainers in their spare time. Six months after the public release of Android 9 Pie, it looks like LineageOS is about ready to make the jump — but not before dropping older devices.
You may not have heard, but Android turned 10 this week. Over the course of the past decade, Google has loaded its phones up with tons of quality wallpapers — and here, we've tried to create a comprehensive repository of them.
Android hardware has come a long way in the last five years, and as we come up on that Pixel time of year, I've been thinking back on earlier Android handsets and the path we've taken to get here. In a useful coincidence, I was convinced into using a Nexus 5 for a week as my only personal phone with no backup — I like to take that sort of risk once in a while. This time I was pleasantly surprised, the Nexus 5 has aged a lot better than I expected it to.
Last August, I published a list of the most and least popular smartphones and tablets used on Android Police. That post was surprisingly popular - and I've had repeated requests for a follow-up. Now that well over a year has passed, I think the time is right for a new installment, and one spanning a far greater time period than the month-long data set I used to compile the last version.
Google regularly rolls out updates to the dialer app on its phones via the Play Store. In the most recent update, the changelog claims "bug fixes," but many users are reporting it introduced a new bug. Dozens of reviews on the Play Store say the February 10th update broke Bluetooth calling.
CyanogenMod is virtually the best-known custom ROM out there, and for good reason: it brings the newest version of Android to devices that would otherwise have to wait much longer to receive it, or would never receive it at all. This week, quite a few popular devices have received CyanogenMod 14.1, which is based on Android 7.1 Nougat.
Cyanogen Inc. may be dying as a company, but the voluntarily-maintained CyanogenMod ROMs are still alive and kicking. Case in point: seven more devices are joining CyanogenMod 14.1, which is based on Android 7.1 Nougat. Six of these Android-powered machines have builds already up, but one doesn't yet.
The idea of a smartphone that magically turns into a full PC has been something of a pipedream for a while now. Motorola tried it with its Atrix laptop dock, Canonical is trying something similar with its Ubuntu Unity phone OS that can dock into a monitor. Even Microsoft is giving it a go with Windows Phone devices that can dock into a slimmed-down ARM Windows environment. The latest attempt with an Android base comes from "Maru OS," the brainchild of developer Preetam D'Souza.
Google has started rolling out the latest round of monthly patches for Nexus devices (and the Pixel C). Maybe you've got that nagging OTA notification on your phone, or maybe you only wish you were so lucky. If you need to update and the factory images are no good, we've got all the OTAs right here. If you want to know what's in this update, check out our full rundown.
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- Well-known developer Francisco Franco says that his custom kernel franco.kernel solves this problem in a flash. (Sorry, sorry.)
The incremental security updates that Android gets are generally regarded as a good thing, but with every software update comes the chance that something could get borked. That's doubly true with faster updates, and it seems to be the case with the latest Marshmallow release for the Nexus 5. According to our own readers, commenters on XDA and Reddit, and not least users on the official AOSP issue tracker, the original Nexus 5 is encountering some serious problems with volume control on the latest build, MOB30P.
The latest factory images and OTA ZIPs bringing July's security patches to Nexus devices are ready for download. Thing is, those files are beefy, and they can take a while to download. Want to take a quicker route? Try downloading an incremental OTA ZIP instead.
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Google formalized the update guarantee for Nexus devices last year in the wake of the Stage Fright vulnerability, but now it's gone a step further by listing the approximate end-of-life (EOL) dates on its support site. Google added this data at some point in the last few weeks, but it has only now been noticed.
June's Android security updates started rolling out earlier this week, but you could still be waiting for them if they're going out in batches. Those of you who are too impatient can get the full factory image and flash it or download the smaller OTA files linked here and sideload them. Cody already posted the detailed changelog if you want to read about all the changes, but if you're just interested in the links, here they are.
Right on schedule on the first Monday of the month, Google's latest security updates for Nexus devices have arrived. Both factory images and OTA update zips for June 2016 are available for the following devices, Android version 6.0.1, listed below with build numbers for your convenience.