Last Updated on April 12, 2017 by Mathew Diekhake
Android 4.4.3 Kitkat has been coming in numerous ways over the past few days, but today is the first time we have covered the Nexus 4. With the file attached below people with the Nexus 4 smartphone can flash and update to Android 4.4.3 KitKat. This update has the build number of KTU84L, and the baseband version is M9615A-CEFWMAZM-2.0.1701.02.
There is one condition that users must abide by for this to work, and that is you need to be running Android 4.4.2 (KOT49H) before installing this new firmware. The Google Nexus 4 started out on Android 4.2.1 and then saw the following updates: Android 4.2.2, 4.3, 4.4 and 4.4.2 before getting to this here today. If you have been keeping the smartphone up to date then you should be on the KOT49H build already.
If we have a file here then you might have guess that this is rolling out OTA as we speak to selected devices. It will work it’s way around to everybody, but it can take weeks. Therefore if you do not want to wait you can use the file we have here instead. If you have root already, you can use OTA Update Center to find OTA updates. These will not come in regularly unless they are on stock firmware.
The size of this file is 77.8 MB, so it is small enough to download OTA is you are doing that, or you will need to make sure you have enough room on the Nexus 4 to download the file. The handset lacks a MicroSD card slot for extra storage space. However, it does come with 16 GB of built-in storage space so that should give you enough flexibility to get this done.
Being such a small file there obviously isn’t an abundance of features to talk about but I can tell you of a few we know about already. There is a Google Phone app upgrade to the keyboard. The old edition was black, and now it is all white. It is to better suit Kitkat. We saw gradual changes to make things whiter in 4.4.2, and this has been further enhanced again. The contacts app profile picture are a different dimension and style. It looks more like the Gmail change we saw a while ago. There are some murmurs that the camera High Dynamic Range mode is faster. There is better performance out of the Autofocus camera feature. These reports are hard to confirm unless we get confirmation from Google. Tell us what you think after you try it out. The overall operating system will be faster and have bug fixes combined with better performance. Android always love to do this so that won’t change. However, it was already very fast so it will become harder to pick from the naked eye.
Whether you are waiting for the over the air update or downloading this file manually everybody should take the necessary precautions and backup the personal data first. It ensures that nothing gets lost, and the user has no regrets. Backup the photos, music, video and everything else you can think of doing. Sync the device with Google Gmail so that contacts and things of that nature get the backup also. Apps can be harder to backup. For them, you can use Helium from the Google Play store. Everybody will need to make sure they have enough battery power before downloading but especially those over the air. Do not start unless you have at least 50%.
The idea is to prepare yourself for the worst case scenario, and that is a full factory reset if something goes wrong. It is not expected to lose data during an official update even if done manually with the file like we have here today, but with technology nothing can be assured. We all know that someone who got themselves in trouble because they didn’t take the time to play it safe.
Download the signed zip file here: KOT94H.61a9ce8d.zip