So that was fast. No sooner than we saw Android Nougat being launched and factory images released to the public, we see a port for the older Nexus smartphones – the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 7 (2013). As you will remember from Google’s update and support policy, these phones will not be getting any Nougat love, and they just barely qualified for Android Marshmallow. So it’s good news that the aftermarket development scene will at least give these devices a taste of Nougat.
The big news is this: XDA developer “Santhosh M” has actually booted Android 7.0 on his Nexus 5, and XDA developer “zaclimon” is pushing for Nougat on the Nexus 7 (2013) tablet. The hardware on both are not necessarily old and slow – the LG-made Nexus 5 runs on a Snapdragon 800 chipset and 2GB RAM, while the older Nexus 7 (2013) runs on a Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset.
The projects are by no means daily drivers – a lot of things are still not working on these ROMs. But the good thing about it is that the aftermarket community is picking up the slack where official builds can’t go. Expect unofficial ports for Snapdragon 800 and 801 devices, like the OnePlus One, the Sony Xperia Z3 among others.
You can head on to the official XDA forum threads via the source links below. In most cases, all you need to run these at this point is flash the ROM via a custom recovery. But these are for test purposes as of the moment, nothing stable yet.
SOURCE: Nexus 5 XDA | Nexus 7 XDA
