The Kit Kat ‘crunch’

Though Google’s benchmark Android Kit Kat 4.4 has hit the streets with their new flagship phone Nexus 5, the OS has yet to make an appearance in other Nexus devices. The 4.4 update has been available OTA (Over The Air) for Nexus devices in certain parts of the world. It just touched down in India a few days ago. This might seem like good news for Nexus owners the rollout is being conducted in phases which is why it might seem a bit frustrating. Devices like Moto X has already received the update, but HTC phones will be witnessing the Kit Kat rollout only in January. Reports from different IT portals and Google’s very own posts say that, they start at 1% of devices for the first 24-48 hours and then they wait for the return rates and resulting device check-ins to confirm for any error reports. This is done to make sure that nothing looks wrong before sending it to more devices. Then it goes to 25%, 50% and 100% over series of weeks.

On the flipside, Google has given an opportunity for the brave of heart to manually download and install the files. To install these files one would have to sideload the files onto their computers and then force feed it into their phones so that they can run the Kit Kat OS. Though this seems like an easy task, if one falters, that could completely root their phone and reboot their phones into factory settings.

The OTA update has been channelised to phones with WiFi connection as the file size would be too taxing for data pack users. The file is approximately 290MB in size.

Also doing the rounds on the internet are various ‘tech-gurus’ who suggest clearing data and force stopping the Google services framework in their phones, but Google Engineer, Dan Morris suggests otherwise.

He says that clearing the service framework data will break things. He said that doing so will change the ID of the device. By doing so one will invalidate tokens used by apps which usually includes all Google apps.