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I'm attempting to update my older Samsung 10.1 to a newer version of Android (7.1) which has been confirmed on a few sites that it's working.

However, the only download links I've found are on sites I'm not so sure I trust to download Android. I want to get it directly from Google/Android.

Does anyone know how to get the OS APKs?

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    As regular users usually do not install firmware images by hand most manufacturer (exception e.g. Google) don't provide public lists of firmware image download links. If you search XDA you may find links to firmware images hosted on the manufacturer servers. Theoretically original firmware images should be signed by the manufacturer but I am not sure how to verify this signature.
    – Robert
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 13:39
  • That explains that... I thought that since Google was more open and that they'd have default OS compilations like I've used for linux.
    – Gratzy
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 14:09
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    OEM firmware images are not distributed as APK files, and most manufacturers do not distribute them at all, however some have special tools to flash the latest images. Otherwise as @Robert noted, check out XDA but also sammobile.com for some possible options. Note that installing it usually not as straight forward as installing an app and clicking update, it usually involves using a computer and specialized applications that do have a possibility of bricking your device.
    – acejavelin
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 16:32

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It seems like for Samsung devices the image download servers are available but there is no user interface to select an image for download. According to XDA blog there is a new Python based command-line tool that allows to search and download Samsung factory images:

https://github.com/nlscc/samloader

As the download information and the firmware images are original downloads from Samsung servers they can be considered trustworthy.

The original article from XDA: https://www.xda-developers.com/samloader-download-updates-samsung-galaxy/

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