After Google recently announced the rollout of Jelly Bean update to Galaxy Nexus devices, I eagerly started to tap the “Check now” button on the system updates page. But still no luck with the update. My Galaxy Nexus seemed to be perfectly happy with Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0.4.
Today I finally realized the reason why I hadn’t gotten the update. I was running “yakjuxw” version of the firmware and the device was called “maguro” (see the ro.product.name and ro.product.device properties on /system/build.prop file). This basically means that my updates were controlled by Samsung instead of Google.
The web is full of instructions on how to update to “yakju” version, which gets the updates directly from Google. I followed these instructions, but downloaded the firmware image from Google servers instead of the provided Dropbox link. Also notice that I already had the Android SDK installed (which contains the fastboot utility).
After flashing the firmware I still had Android 4.0.4, but now tapping the check for updates gave a notification about an available update to Jelly Bean, Android 4.1.1. Everything went smoothly for me, but notice that unlocking the bootloader WILL CLEAR ALL DATA on the phone. Also if you do this, you are doing it on your own risk, don’t blame me if you brick your phone.
