Pixel 4a sunfish: upgrade and change stable -> dev?

I kindly ask for some guidance on the following question as I have no experience whatsoever with flashing etc. of devices manually (spoiled stable OTA on e-shop device -user so far…):

I am offered a Pixel 4a sunfish already equiped with:
e-1.21-r-20240323388914-stable-sunfish

Now I wonder if it is likely to suceed to change over to:
e-2.0-t-20240508399779-dev-sunfish
(or e-1.21-t-20240326389105-dev-sunfish to start with - in case v2.0 has issues maybe)
…utilizing this in-depth howto: [HOWTO] an Unified Install Guide Project for /e/
Or are there any obstacles to be expected or anything one should better now in advance for this specific task?

(background is: I am looking for a replacement for my S7 because from what I understand so far it will not go beyond R and thus will not receive further security patches beyond February this Year (?)

  • You should succeed by installing the build you choose from the recovery-e (applying a format /data if needed).

  • needed firmware partitions to be upgraded are expected to be included in the /e/OS-T build and installed along it.

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Thanks for your quick answer!

OK, from my understanding of the process so far you suggest to install simply from recovery with image-zip on SD?
That sounds doable :slight_smile:

And should I “update” the recovery first (like most version-images seem to have their specific accompanying recovery-version)?
Or is your second bullet-point already the answer “no” to this question?

You can flash the new recovery to get all chances with you to succeed at the first attempt
Or choose “less operations as possible” and see if you encountred issues…

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Thanks again!

will update here once I got the device…

Here some reference that it works:

I think the whole radio and vendor was not necessary.

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Thanks for the reference!

I never heard the expression “radio and vendor” … Do you mean in the end the process worked much more simple and straightforward than anticipated?
Like “just flash” ?

From what I understand is radio the software part which makes sure your phone can connect to a cell tower, vendor is the part which makes sure your hardware and software work properly together.

But yeah, I meant like piero told you, just flash :grin::grin: and if something doesn’t work you can check what I did and maybe get a solution. And as always make a BACKUP :wink:.

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I would be more optimistic based on Merge branch ‘959devices-s-herolte-bringup’ into ‘v1-s’

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That looks promising - will take some time I assume.
makes me think twice
(And does it mean that security patches for S7 will be available for R?
I have to admit that I didn’t understand this security patch issue well enough to be able to judge if and how critical it really is in my case…)

I would say no, backporting such patches has not been done for any device previously by /e/ (to my knowledge).

The /e/OS method would be to try to bring up the device to the next Android version where SPL are current as we see in that commit.

To understand the SPL better one could read the Google / Android bulletin and introductions https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin regularly and try to gain an understanding of the importance of changes that might affect one.

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Update:
in the end it was a 4a with stock ROM (instead of eOS as initially discussed),
it worked fine and I learned something :grinning:

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