Last Updated on June 14, 2019 by Mathew Diekhake

Nexus 6 is the best, new and powerful smartphone in today’s smartphone market. Also getting new updates these times and now it gets Android M updates, so your phone should be updated in all aspects like in recovery also. The stock recovery in Nexus 6 is the latest but not capable of performing advanced actions on your phone. With this custom recovery your phone will be complete with the latest and touch enabled recovery.

A custom recovery image is necessary if you want to start flashing custom ROMs, root-requiring applications from Google Play and other third-party sources, and sometimes even to root the nexus 6. if you are running the latest Android M Developer Preview at the time of reading this guide, then you’d know the current way to root that is by installing SuperSu 2.49 and the Despair kernel.
Nexus 6 with Lollipop

If you ever booted your phone to recovery mode then you will know that recovery is an important mode in Android devices it does all custom actions for you in just a click of button or hardware key. The recovery that comes preinstalled on your phone is the stock recovery with which you can do some general things with your phone like clearing cache, installing updates or factory resetting your phone. However, for some custom actions like installing custom ROM, custom kernels or tweak your phone’s performance you need a good custom ROM like TWRP custom recovery. TWRP custom recovery has some good features than any other recovery like touch screen feature and installing multiple zip files at a time.

For installing this on your phone you need some tools – a Windows-based PC with internet connection and antivirus softwares disabled during this installation process, a USB cable and your phone with USB debugging enabled, do that by going to Settings > Developer Options > check the USB debugging option there.

Caution:

  • Before proceeding to installation process make sure that your phone should have enough battery (at least 50%) to make it through this process to the end.
  • This process of installing custom recovery is only for Nexus 6, do not try to install it on other device or it may damage that device.

Steps to install TWRP custom recovery on Nexus 6

  1. First download adb package from here and extract it anywhere on your PC.
  2. Now download the TWRP recovery image file for Nexus 6 and move it to the same extracted ADB folder.
  3. Connect your phone to your PC using a USB cable.
  4. Now open the command window by right-clicking on the empty blank space inside the ADB folder and selecting the “open command window here” option.
  5. On the command window, type this command “adb reboot bootloader”.
  6. Your Nexus phone will shut down automatically and boot to bootloader mode.
  7. After that, type this command on command window: “flastboot flash recovery openrecovery-twrp-2.8.2.0-shamu.img”.
  8. This will start to flash the recovery image file to your phone.
  9. After the flashing’s done, unplug your Nexus phone from PC and reboot your phone to OS mode.

Great! The latest TWRP recovery has been installed on your phone.If you have any difficulty in installing or using the recovery then you can ask me using the comment section below.