Jelly Bean on the Galaxy Nexus - forcing an update?

Question

I bought my Galaxy Nexus in New Zealand - via parallel importing. I believe it came from Russia, given my manual was in Russian(!). But it works perfectly and is genuine.

A colleague there bought one from the same source the next day, and his arrived a day after mine.

I then moved to Canada, and got a Rogers sim card. All good.

However, my ex-colleague got a 4.0.4 upgrade about 8 weeks before myself. I tried forcing an update, but no luck.

Then last week, I finally got 4.0.4, and about the same day, my old colleague emailed to say he got an OTA update to 4.1.

What gives? Is it a geo-fenced roll-out? How can I force an update? (I've gone to system updates to check for an update, but no luck). Or would I have to root and do it manually? I'd prefer not to if there's a simple way to force an update...

Baseband I9250XXLA2, Build IMM76K.I9250XWLD2

Answer 1

There are many variations of the Galaxy Nexus. Most likely, your phone is yakjuxw, which gets the updates from Samsung. The other phone is either yakju or takju, which use Google's own updates, which are released quicker.

The versions are interchangeable, if you don't account for international customizations or possible carrier modifications. For example, see my answer here on how to change the yakjuxw firmware to takju Jelly Bean, which can be then officially upgraded to 4.1.1 via OTA.

Answer 2

I waited very impatiently for the JellyBean update for few days last week and finally did this to get JB on my Galaxy Nexus.

Manually trigger the update by clearing the data in Google Services Framework and then check for System Update in Settings.

You might have to do this multiple times though. I had to do it 5 times to get the update. You might be lucky to get it in fewer attempts as well.

Btw, I got my phone from US and I stay in India. I am not really sure if this really matters.

Answer 3

I had the same problem: I bought my phone from Amazon.com and got stuck on 4.0.2 with no OTA upgrades. When I looked into it, it turned out that I was running a firmware (yakjujp) that was set to get updates from Samsung, as opposed to getting them directly from Google.

First you need to determine if your device is receiving updates directly from Google, which you can tell from its build name. I ended up temporarily installing this application (warning: contains gratuitous ads) and looking at the "Brand" field. If you're not on "yakju" then you'll need to switch builds in order to get official updates from Google.

I followed these painful Windows instructions while I really should have looked at these ones instead (and ignored most of the steps given how much easier this process is on Linux).

The whole procedure can be summarized like this:

1. Backup your phone.
2. Unlock the boot loader (which erases everything).
3. Reboot into fastboot (hold down Volume Up and Volume Down then press the power button).
4. Flash all of the different firmware images.
5. Reboot and reinstall/reconfigure apps.

This is summarized from a blog post I wrote about manually moving to the "vanilla" 4.0.4 yakju firmware, and shortly after I received the 4.1.1 OTA update from Google.