This post was published 9 years, 11 months ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some material it contains may no longer be applicable.
While many will still be waiting diligently for 5.0, Google is not wasting any time and has already produced another update to Android: 5.0.1 (LRX22C).
Since this update has only been out a few hours, there is no official changelog yet and therefore we don’t know exactly what is included in this new version. All we can really do is speculate at this point.
This update is of course not going to be another major release, but rather a small patch which will most likely just contain bug fixes based on reports submitted by users currently running 5.0 on their (mostly Nexus) devices. One bug in particular we are hoping this might fix is the video playback issues on the Nexus 7 2013 (not that we have experienced it ourselves but we’ve heard many people have and it sounds pretty bad).
Another possibility is that it could also bring changes related to supporting the next major update to Android Wear (Android Wear 2.0) which is expected to be released soon and bring the system base up to Lollipop (currently Wear is based on KitKat). This suspicion was raised as Derek Ross (of Phandroid) teased an image on Google+ showing hugely improved battery life with a new version of Android Wear which was carrying the Android build number 5.0.1.
Update: We have also since heard that this update may contain fixes specifically for Nexus tablets which were apparently having some issues after factory resets.
Anyway, the changes have been pushed out to AOSP so if you are a ROM developer you can sync with the Android repository now and get all the latest fixes / improvements from Google.
If you’re just obsessed with new things, you can also already flash Android 5.0.1 to select Nexus devices. So far Google has posted the Android 5.0.1 factory images for the Nexus 7 (2013) Wi-Fi, Nexus 9 and Nexus 10.
Bare in mind though that if you choose to flash these as they are provided, they will wipe you device! However, if you edit the flash-all script (.sh for Linux & Mac, .bat for Windows) to remove the “flash userdata” line and the “-w” from the update line before running it, you should be able to avoid this.
Still, for most people, waiting for the OTA is probably the better move. We will post the links once we get them to apply the OTA manually for those who are impatient but want to avoid the factory images or have locked bootloaders. If you want to download the factory images now or take a delve into the AOSP commits then hit the source links at the bottom of this article.
I will be flashing the factory images on my Nexus 7 and 10 in a bit and will see if I can find anything. If you decided to as well do let us know if you spot anything different.
Sources: AOSP, Factory Images
