Jelly Bean on the GNex

By some strange miracle, the Android Jelly Bean update was released for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus today.  For the last 2 months I never felt the usual (and completely shameful) anxiety I get when waiting for an Android update to be approved by Verizon.  Rather, I was entirely relaxed, perhaps because Ice Cream Sandwich is still good enough on its own.  However, once I heard the news, I went nuts.  All after noon I tried to force the update to push using various tricks I read about online.  A terrible idea, mind you, and a waste of time, so I bit the bullet an attempted Plan B - "Installing the update manually".

I used to do this all the time with my old Droid 1.  Someone in the community would grab the update file, which you loaded onto the SD card. From the bootloader, you could then install the update and reboot.  It was simply, easy, and you didn't need to mess around with rooting the device.

But that was back in the Wild West days of Android, when the bootloader was wide open.  These days, most devices lock their bootloaders, though some, like the Galaxy Nexus, protect it with the equivalent of a screen door.  That is to say, it was made by design to be incredibly easy to unlock.

At least, that's what everyone in the community claimed.  Yet when I first looked for instructions on how to do it, I came away more confused than before.  Everyone recommended downloading a variety of user made tools that would unlock and root the device for you.  As I mentioned in my last post, I'm not a big fan of running software like this without knowing what it is doing.  For me, this isn't an option.  Personal choice aside, however, I failed to understand how unlocking the GNex could be considered easy when it required community enthusiasts to come up with the tools to do it?

I knew there was another way.  There had to be.  Why else would people say it was designed to be unlocked?  I confirmed my suspicion fairly quickly.  At least one tutorial on the subject referred to an alternate, more difficult method of unlocking, one which involved using the Android SDK.  Suddenly it all made sense.

Here's the scoop, so far as I can tell.  If you have the Android SDK, you have all the tools needed to unlock the bootloader on the GNEX.  With one command, you can reboot it into recovery mode, and with another you can issue the unlock command.  Done and done.  Installing the manual update file for Jelly Bean does require from outside help, in the form of a custom recovery tool like Clockwork Mod Recovery.  Thankfully, Clockwork is a well known and reputable piece of software, so I wasn't afraid to use it.  Moreover, once I ran it, I could immediately tell what its purpose was. It looks just like the bootloader/recovery program from the OG Droid, the one I used to use.  My only issue with Clockwork was getting it running.  From what I can tell, you can flash it onto the phone using the SDK tools, but it seemed to go away once the phone restarted.  If that's the case then I'm even more pleased, since it means I can load it up for one time uses when need be. 

When all was said and done, I had the official Jelly Bean update on my phone, and I learned a valuable lesson.  What most Android enthusiasts considered "hard mode" is actually very easy if you're the kind of person who 1) isn't afraid to install the SDK, 2) knows how to do it, 3) did it already for actual development, use and 4) understands what it does.

Moreover, I discovered that while the actual developers in the Android hacking community are far smarter than I, the guys who are obsessed with unlocking/rooting/flashing ROMs are not necessarily so.  Guess I have to trust my instincts a little more.