Updating Your Nexus 7 to 4.1.2 and Rooting 4.1.2

I had some issues updating my Nexus 7 to 4.1.2. So I thought I’ll share about it. The 4.1.2 update lets you view the home screen in landscape orientation on 7 inch tablets, and includes performance and stability improvements.

Over-the-air OTA

For all intent and purposes, the update should reach your device over the air, prompting you with a straight forward install. If that fails, you could try the following:

1. Go to Settings -> Apps -> All
2. Find Google Services Framework.
3. Tap on Force Stop.
4. Select Clear Data.
5. Head back to the Nexus 7’s Settings, go to About, and check for a System Update.

Works for some people, some people reported it working after multiple tries of doing the same thing, didn’t work for me.

So the next step is how do you manually update to 4.1.2 if OTA does not work.

Manual Update of 4.1.2

If you have root, and recovery installed on your device, you could try installing google’s update of 4.1.2.

If you are getting an “error 7”. It means your rom is not stock, and you can’t use the update file. This happened to me, although I don’t recall making any modifications to my rom.

Factory Images of 4.1.2

You can download the factory images of 4.1.2 and flash. Note that a factory reset will format your internal storage. You will lose whatever files you have, including all titanium backups. So be warned.

You Will Lose Root

You will lose root if you update to 4.1.2. You could try using applications like rootkeeper. I’ve seen reports of mixed success.

Root Your Nexus 7 (4.1.2) again

There are a few ways to rooting your nexus 7 after you updated to 4.1.2. Try the nexus root device or the nexus toolkit. However, both seem to have trouble with some (not all) bootloader version 4.1.2. One of the workarounds currently is to downgrade your bootloader to 4.1.1. As of this time of writing, there’s no 100% reliable rooting of 4.1.2 yet.

If you’re confused with how to get to fastboot, it is done by holding your power button until you see the Google logo, then press Vol down. This will get you to the fastboot screen.

Conclusion

I hope your update went well. 4.1.2 brings with it landscape mode, and various bug fixes. Not an urgent update, but definitely useful. Landscape mode makes the device’s interface much more intuitive.