Downgraded from Android Marshmallow to KitKat on my Nexus 5

Introduction

Yes, you read it right. Downgrading is not a term that's often associated with me, but I had to do it. And in this case, it is not just one, but two major OS versions that I had to say bye bye to.

I had to do it to confirm a critical issue that I was facing with my Nexus 5 was caused by the OS updates.

The issue that I was facing was regarding navigation in Google Maps. If you are a regular follower of my blog, you would know that I recently migrated to Australia. I also bought my first car, not because it is a fashion, but it is an absolute necessity in Australia. The country is huge and the public transport service is not efficient for a developed nation. Since the country is quite new to me, I have to get the help of a navigator to drive few km even. My car does not have an inbuilt navigator nor I did buy a 3rd party one. I depend on Google Maps on my phone for that.

But it was not working as expected.

The maps would suddenly stop updating my location and because of this, I have missed my turn several times. I was not sure why it stopped updating the location every now and then (this usually happens like one or two times in every trip and if I reboot the phone before starting navigation, this would happen less often, but it would still happen.)

I found out the reason why the location was not updating accidently. I wanted to know who the culprit was so I installed Nokia Here maps (which by the way, is brilliant! It even shows the speed limits for the section of the road.) to first rule out Google Maps was not the one. The same thing happened with Nokia Here maps too and instead of being tight lipped, it informed me “GPS Signal Lost”. This was when I found out, it was not a problem with Google Maps, but a problem with GPS signal reception. Was it really cloud cover? Probably it has something to do with it, but why would this happen everyday?

When I searched around the web, I found out that many peoples’ Nexus 5 phones were plagued with this issue, and they were claiming this happened after upgrading to Lollipop from KitKat (the OS that Nexus 5 was originally shipped with). But I was already on Marshmallow and I have no data to support that this problem showed up after upgrading the OS. This is because, I never drove since I had the phone, until now.

But there was one way to find out. That was by actually downgrading the OS to KitKat and experimenting.

[Rant] Downgrade bios to improve stability on the Maximus VI Hero motherboard?

Asus has been quite busy releasing new bios updates in the last month or so. They are getting ready to welcome the "new" (*laugh*) Haswell Refresh CPUs. Intel is releasing a new chipset as well, namely the 9-series but board manufacturers are updating their boards with 8-series chipsets to support Haswell Refresh. We shouldn't need a separate chipset for the exactly same CPU architecture. Heck, we shouldn't need. A new chipset for Broadwell either. It is still going to be same as Haswell, with a die shrink.

Let's not get carried away now.

So in the last couple of months I saw about 3 firmware versions come out for my board from Asus. In addition to saying that these bring support for the newer CPUs, Asus has been putting the same string of "improve system stability" with each of them. So I updated each time hoping that it would improve the overclock of my 4770K. Sadly, it's done nothing like that. However, I didn't notice any instabilities either.